The Local Nakba Committee, Arab Film Festival and Arab Resource & Organizing Center present:
Anti Apartheid and Non-Violence in Palestine: Bil’in Habibti Screening & Speaking Tour

Featuring Palestinian & Israeli Activists: Mansour Mansour & Shai Carmeli Pollack
Presenting Shai’s film: Bil’in Habibti (Bil’in my Love)

Tuesday, March 18th, 6:30-7pm Reception & 7-9 Screening/ Program
Delancey Street Theater, 600 Embarcadero, San Francisco
$7 for members of the Arab Film Festival or AROC
$10 for non-members
Tickets available at the event

Join the Discussion about the non-violent movement in Palestine; and joint struggles of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, and their response to Israeli military violence.

The Palestinian village of Bil’in is about to lose over half of its territory to Israel. The residents of the village decide to embark on a struggle against the construction of the Wall. The film exposes the extraordinary relationship formed between villagers and the documentary’s Israeli director, Shai Carmeli-Pollak, who arrives with a group of Israeli peace activists to protest the construction. The film documents the familiar but uneasy relationships and conflicts that arise between Carmeli-Pollak, the villagers, and the Israeli Defense Force, in which he once served.
For more info: visit: www.stopapartheid.org

Montalvo & Aurora Forum at Stanford University present with the Arab Film Festival:
Filmmaking in Iraq: The Challenge of
Building a Cinematic Voice

Filmmakers Maysoon Pachachi, Kasim Abid, Fady Hadid in
conversation with Stanford Professor Kristine Samuelson

Monday, March 17th, 7:30 PM, FREE ADMISSION
CARRIAGE HOUSE THEATRE @ MONTALVO ARTS CENTER
Pre-Conversation Peek, 6 PM: Kasim Abid screens clips from
his new film After the Fall and fields Q&A. Reception with wine and light appetizers follows.

MAYSOON PACHACHI & KASIM ABID: Founders of the Independent Film & Television College in Baghdad (2004), Pachachi and Abid present student films and discuss the challenges of filmmaking in the current Iraqi climate.

FADY HADID: Producer of Hometown Baghdad, a documentary Web series following the lives of Iraqi 20-somethings trying to survive in Baghdad, he is a member of the Najeen Group, an Iraqi artists’ initiative that supports and produces theater, art and films.

KRISTINE SAMUELSON (moderator): Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford, Samuelson serves as the director of the Film and Media Studies Program and the Documentary Film and Video MFA Program. She has also been an independent film producer for more than 25 years.

This is the final program in a series of five conversations on art and cultural production in Iraq through Montalvo’s collaboration with the Aurora Forum at Stanford University.
IRAQ: REFRAME is funded by David and Lucile Packard Foundation and Montalvo members. For more information, call 408-961-5800 or visit www.montalvoarts.org

The Arab Film Festival is proud to co-present with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley (CMES):
Noor Award Winner Salata Baladi

Screening of the documentary Salata Baladi by Nadia Kamel (filmmaker expected)
Winner of 2007 Arab Film Festival Noor Award

Thursday, March 20th, 5:00 PM, FREE ADMISSION
Stephens Hall, Sultan Room, 340 Stephens, UC Berkeley

Egypt was not always hostage to the myth of being a homogenous society. Rather, it was once a multi-ethnic and religiously heterogeneous society. Salata Baladi is the personal history of the filmmaker’s grandmother, Mary, as told to her grandson, Nabeel. Like many Egyptians born at the end of a century filled with multiple waves of immigration, religious conversions, and mixed marriages, Nabeel is a mix of Egyptian, Italian, Palestinian, and Lebanese identities, with some Russian, Caucasian, Turkish, and Spanish inherited from Muslim, Christian and Jewish ancestors. As Mary weaves her way through the family tales, she bumps into her own fears and continued silence shrouding the Israeli branch of her family. In an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people, Mary has boycotted her family in Israel for 55 long years. Inspired by the telling of her own stories and the fresh perspective her ten-year-old grandson brings to them, she and her loving, eclectic circle of friends and family engage in breaking one of the most vicious taboos in modern Egypt.

Event Contact: 510-642-8208

The Arab Film Festival co-presents with Kino21
Palestine: Exterior / Interior

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008, 8 PM
Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Local San Francisco artist James T. Hong presents This Shall be a Sign(2007) and visiting Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari presents The Roof (2006). While both these works take up the contemporary moment in Palestine/Israel, they do so in radically different ways, both formally and thematically.

Hong’s half-hour video is an experimental collage that includes his own observational footage and various media reports of the recent conflict over the reconstruction of an entrance ramp to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. Representations of this conflict, and some of those other conflicts metonymically and metaphorically associated with it-from land rights to the battle of civilizations to Armageddon-form the core of Hong’s larger exploration of how information, beliefs, and truths are manufactured, embellished, circulated. Hong describes the piece as: “an interpretation of the conflict over the reconstruction of a ramp in Jerusalem, of the struggle for sovereignty over a holy site, and of the power of technology as the ubiquitous medium of communication and information in the age of multinational capitalism and the dominion of the English language.” Shot while he was briefly in Israel to present an earlier film, This Shall Be a Sign is the work of a consummate outsider who takes us on an outsider’s journey where we must navigate the carefully crafted inhuman and all-too-human languages and rhetoric of a mass of competing, conflicting media. (32 mins, in English, Arabic, and Hebrew with English subtitles throughout, color, beta)

Kamal Aljafari’s The Roof, on the other hand, is a work literally “from the interior,” in other words from and about a Palestinian family that circumstances forced to stay in the area that is now part of the state of Israel. A loosely structured, visually eloquent, and politically understated cinematic essay, The Roof explores physical and psychic senses of place in the context of Aljafari’s family history. He returns to and films his parents’ and grandmother’s homes in Ramleh and Jaffa, now part of Israel, and portrays bits of three generations’ lives indelibly marked by the events of 1948. Using elegant cinematography, unhurried rhythms, and fragmented narrative, Aljafari conveys how the region’s space, time, history -as well as the forms of individual experience they generate- have been molded by politics and Israeli institutionalized neglect. The roof of Aljafari’s title is an absent one, on the unfinished house where his family has lived since their resettlement in 1948, and it functions as a place of waiting marked by constant deferral. Curator Jean-Pierre Rehm has called the film “as much a stylistic as a political manifesto” that “reveals not so much the meaning of an absent roof, but the architecture of identity, place, and present pasts.” (61 mins, in Arabic, Hebrew and English with English subtitles, Color, Beta)