Published in IndieWire.com

Lorber Films has picked up U.S. rights to Belgium, France, Palestine production,

“Salt of the Sea,”

by debut director, Annemarie Jacir. Richard Lorber, co-president and CEO of

Lorber Films negotiated the pact with Yoann Ubermulhin of Pyramide International.

The film, produced by Danny Glover, will have its U.S. theatrical premiere on August 13th at New York’s Quad Cinemas, followed by engagements in select cities, with DVD and digital distribution to follow in the first quarter of 2011.

The film is described by Lorber as the “politically and emotionally explosive story of Soraya (Suheir Hammad), a Brooklyn-born woman of Palestinian lineage who comes to Israel to search for the land and ancestral home near Jaffa from where her grandparents were ejected 60 years ago. Once she arrives, reality strikes hard and her mission to claim what is hers and fulfill her lifelong dream to ‘return’ to Palestine is obstructed at every turn.  Having discovered that her grandfather’s bank account was frozen and seized in 1948, she goes to the new Ramallah branch of the bank to claim the funds.  Frustrated and deluded when her demands are rebuffed, she and her new Palestinian boyfriend Emad decide to take control of their own destinies.”

“‘Salt of the Sea’ is an incredibly timely, groundbreaking work and a formidable debut from a new filmmaking talent,” said Lorber in a statement. “That Annemarie Jacir also happens to be female and Palestinian marks this film as part of a bold new chapter in Palestinian cinema. This film touches nerves on every side because of the combined political and emotional impact of the story, and Annmarie’s daring gift for unspooling human drama and primal themes.”

Kino Lorber is the newly formed company that combined Lorber Films, Alive Mind and Kino International and its heads, Richard Lorber and Donald Krim, specializing in independent film distribution.

“Salt of the Sea”:

109 Minutes. English and Arabic with English Subtitles. Belgium, France, Palestine. Directed by Annemarie Jacir. Screenplay by Annemarie Jacir. Produced by Danny Glover.

Jimmy Johnson, The Electronic Intifada, 21 July 2010

Women march against the Israeli wall in a scene from Budrus.

Event-based storytelling is an infamous form most prominent in the science fiction sub-genre of the Space Opera. The main failing of the style is the general inability of event progression to effectively substitute for character development. Budrus is an event-based story without all but the most minimal character development, yet it still succeeds by compellingly capturing a moment. Director Julia Bacha combines conventional point-and-shoot with in situ interviews, beautiful and sometimes chaotic footage of protests, maps, graphics and a bit of expository text to piece together a lovely film exploring the evolution of the West Bank village of Budrus’ resistance to Israel’s wall, and its reclaiming of its destiny.

The film opens with Palestinian community organizer Ayed Morrar laying out strategies of “popular resistance and nonviolence.” He puts together the basic tenets of the struggle: Palestinian demands for the right to self-determination and dignity. The West, Israel included, has long embraced such views; the difference being in Budrus, Palestinians take them much more seriously than the West. They evidently believe they are equally human and hold such rights to be literally universal. How dare they!

Israel’s privileged enjoyment of rights is captured in the film in an interview with Israeli army captain Doron Spielman who states that “Ultimately speaking a nonviolent protest is not going to stop the ultimate way of the fence. It’s not going to happen. Because Israeli men, women and children need to go sleep at night.” It’s as authentic a representation of Israel’s rationalization of its 43-year occupation as one could find and it also represents the greatly circumscribed ideals all too common in Israeli society: with true peace thought unattainable, the replacement ideal becomes “peace and quiet.” Bacha allows Spielman and others the room to say their peace and let it sink or swim in the film based on the context alone, only once offering an explicitly contradictory voice in succession.

The film’s three main characters are the village of Budrus, Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank, and “The Struggle.” The interplay between these characters speaks to the intimacy of the environment to culture and culture to life. A local farmer explains that in agricultural villages like Budrus, “Death, stealing the land, and uprooting the trees are one and the same.” This context adds weight to scenes of the Israeli army uprooting parts of an olive grove. The land-culture-life connection is never clearer than a scene where a middle-aged farmer says to a border policeman: “You uprooted my olive trees? I have nowhere else to move them.” The pain and dislocation are written in his expressions and mannerisms.

The struggle in Budrus is not limited to Palestinian liberation. There is factionalism, interference by the Palestinian Authority, fatalism, gender concerns, media difficulties — Al-Jazeera will only come if there is a spectacle — and other problems. Herein is one of the film’s greatest accomplishments. Budrus documents how the struggle against Israel’s wall brought about broader community liberation. Ayed demands his community respect its own potential and become agents for change: “Either we call it fate and give up like we usually do, saying: ‘This is the will of God.’ Or we consider it an injustice that must be faced and challenged.”

Meanwhile, Ayed’s daughter Iltizam expresses skepticism about the lack of women’s participation. “We saw the men trying to push the soldiers and none of them could do that,” she says with a conspiratorial grin. “But I think the girls could do that.” And so it went. And so they did.

The film threatens to fall into all kinds of traps of schmaltz and slogans but never does. It seems like it’s going towards political partisanship then doesn’t. It feels like it’s going towards Palestinian epiphanies of, “Oh, there are nice Israelis too,” then avoids the easy answer. It’s not because Budrus is an exceptionally accomplished film. There is almost a complete lack of character development and the lack of temporal context (When did all this happen? How long did it take?). The film is often very predictable all of this points to a flawed film. The camerawork is unremarkable if unobtrusive. Although the film doesn’t feel like it should be as good as it is, with Ayed, Iltizam, teacher and organizer Ahmed Awwad, Israeli border police, military spokesmen, activists and anarchists combining with footage of protests, organizing, brutal policing and debates, Budrus captures truthfully a remarkable moment. And “The Struggle” makes for a very moving character even though the individuals shaping it remain largely props.

The film does have one notable misstep for which the filmmakers can only be held partially responsible, it occasionally dips into facile versions of “can’t-we-all-just-get-along-ness.” Nicolas Kristof’s recent New York Times editorial invokes both the film and the village as part of a horribly paternalistic suggestion that Palestinians need only have “their own Gandhi” to deserve the right of self-determination. The reality of solidarity and joint struggle between Israeli leftists and Palestinians is very complex due to the occupier-occupied and colonizer-colonized dynamic. The people of Budrus and their comrades standing in solidarity struggled hard and not always successfully to navigate the colonial relationship and recognize the tension between real solidarity and paternalism. There is much to cover in the film and it does not get into this aspect of the struggle, understandably as the film is about Budrus, its people and their struggle, not about Israeli leftists and others. For this reason Western liberals like Kristof will likely love the film, marveling at Arabs who shockingly choose not to blow themselves up and wondering out loud how one says “Gandhi” in Arabic. Their own misunderstanding of the events of Budrus (and Gandhi!) are more to blame than Bacha but a fuller development of the characters of the film would likely have better revealed the complex dynamics in play.

The victory of a small West Bank village to move the wall a few kilometers and reclaim the vast majority of the land confiscated by Israel is an impressive enough achievement outside the context of the occupation. For those well-versed in Palestinian grassroots organizing it’s a level of achievement that is scarcely believable as the immense economic, military and political force differential between Israelis and Palestinians normally resolves local struggles to Israel’s favor. But not in Budrus. And Julia Bacha’s film truly captures this revolutionary moment and shares it with the audience.

An associate of Eugene Debs once related, “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part of it. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” Budrus is like that.

Jimmy Johnson is a mechanic based in Detroit. He can be reached at johnson [dot] jimmy [at] gmail [dot] com.

Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 13 April 2010

Mohammad Bakri and Mira Awad in Michel Khleifi’s Zindeeq.

Michel Khleifi, the celebrated director of Wedding in Galilee, turns the camera inward in his 2009 feature film, Zindeeq (the meanings of which include “atheist” or “freethinker”), featured at the opening of the annual Chicago Palestine Film Festival this Friday. It is Khleifi’s first feature film in 14 years; his most recent film was the 2003 documentary he filmed in collaboration with Eyal Sivan, Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel.

Zindeeq’s protagonist, never referred to in the film by name and performed by the high-profile Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri, is an expat filmmaker from Nazareth who is back in his homeland to interview refugees of the 1948 expulsion, or Nakba, in the West Bank. Unable to reach his sister’s Nazareth home after a day of filming, because his nephew has killed a man and every male in the family is subject to vendetta, the filmmaker becomes an exile within his homeland as one hotel after another tells him he isn’t welcome to stay.

At one point, after a sympathetic clerk attempts to convince his boss to let a room to the filmmaker, our protagonist asks why he was refused. The young clerk simply stares at him. Perhaps the protagonist really understands the unspoken reason of why he can find no room in Nazareth while partying Israeli soldiers and Arab elite face no such prohibition, but the viewer is not given enough cues to appreciate why.

While the film is dripping with symbolism, the narrative is too thin and the dialogue too sparse for the protagonist’s journey to be transcendent. Meanwhile, other narrative devices confuse rather than clarify. The protagonist is constantly filming or viewing his documentary footage on his handheld camcorder, but sometimes the camera serves a prop for a dream sequence or memory flashback. However, the lack of distinct contrast between the different types of sequences makes it a challenge to follow the narrative or experience the main character’s personal breakthrough.

Likewise, the film is heavy on metaphor and Biblical allusions that sometimes overly abstract the narrative. At other times however the symbolism is more successful. During his night journey the protagonist finds the wells of the Virgin Mary’s spring in Nazareth dried up and a drunk man on the street offers him a drink from his bottle, which the initially grateful protagonist learns the hard way is full of alcohol. The amused drunk lucidly explains that the spring dried up long ago, and now the Israeli state water company Mekorot sells water to the church. A weary traveler will find alcohol where a spring once flowed, Jesus’s hometown is patrolled at night by roving bands of thugs, and undocumented laborers including children squat in abandoned homes in fear of arrest in Khleifi’s contemporary Nazareth.

Parallel to his attempt to find a place to rest his head, the protagonist is on a quest to understand the actions of his parents’ generation. As though he were a doctor interviewing a patient about her symptoms, he interviews a refugee in Ramallah about the circumstances of her exile from Lydd, in what is now considered Israel. However, the real burning question for the protagonist is why his parents remained in Nazareth during the 1948 Nakba.

Intertwined with his coming to terms with his parents’ history is the protagonist’s reconciliation with his own past. The protagonist’s assistant and romantic interest, Racha, becomes a revelation to him and his peace seems to depend on her forgiveness of his carnal sins. But the contrast between the character’s more spiritual connection with Racha and the many other women who are more available to him sexually is taken for granted, a problem that dogs the narrative. (Racha’s character is performed by Mira Awad, who last year received a letter from co-star Bakri amongst other Palestinian artists in Israel asking her to not take part in the Eurovision contest in which she was co-representing Israel. Last week she made headlines again when she withdrew from the UK Zionist Federation’s Israel Independence Concert in London, denying reports that she canceled because of threats against her and her family.)

More rich than the thin Racha plot-line however is the treatment of intra-Palestinian strife, and the portrayal of a society where neighbors “have no time” in the sense that no matter how much time passes, neighbors cannot become strangers, while at the same time the action of one member can plunge a whole family into violence. Some of these internal contradictions are broached in Rachid Masharawi’s Laila’s Birthday (2008) (which also featured Bakri behind the wheel of a car for much of the film, this time playing a taxi driver).

Likewise, Khleifi is not the first to approach the subject of the perceived failure of the 1948 generation; fellow Nazarene filmmaker Elia Suleiman’sChronicle of a Disappearance similarly follows an unnamed protagonist’s exile within the homeland and shows his parents falling asleep in front of the TV as the Israeli flag flickers on the screen and the national anthem plays on. Where Suleiman’s Chronicle is a series of vignettes with sharp edges, Khleifi’s nighttime scenes are more blurred at the edges, giving it a dreamy, even languid tone.

A further comparison to another recent Palestinian feature film helps distinguish Khleifi’s production and demonstrate the breadth of style of current Palestinian filmmaking. Like Annemarie Jacir’s protagonist Soraya inSalt of This Sea (2008), Khleifi’s main character is a Palestinian living in the diaspora returning to his homeland. Though neither film ties up their narratives in a neat bow, Jacir’s film uses popular Palestinian symbolism such as the remains of destroyed villages to make a cinematic case for the Palestinian cause, while Khleifi’s film uses a whole other visual language to approach another facet of the 1948 Nakba. That the two films come one year after another is a tribute to Palestinian filmmaking and storytelling — reaffirmed with a wink when Khleifi’s protagonist, showing a boy from Gaza begging in the streets of Nazareth how to hold a camera, says, “We, we make films, not wars.”

For more information on the Chicago Palestine Film Festival visithttp://palestinefilmfest.com/.

Maureen Clare Murphy is managing editor of The Electronic Intifada.

Susan Youssef writing from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Live from Palestine, 22 March 2010

The poster image from the film Habibi Rasak Kharban, taken in 2009. (P.J. Raval)

23 December 2009

I am on a plane, on the way back from Palestine to my apartment — a quiet, private place set in rainy Amsterdam. It is there where I will edit my filmHabibi Rasak Kharban (Darling, There’s Something Wrong with Your Head), a love story set in the Gaza Strip. I have just finished shooting it, the first dramatic feature to be made about Gaza in more than ten years. And it took me seven years of continuous development and fundraising to shoot it.

I first visited Gaza in 2002 when I was shooting my documentary Forbidden to Wander. It was then I saw children acting out the romance of Majnun Layla, a classical narrative recorded by the writer Ibn Qutayba in ninth century Iraq. It tells the story of Qays, who is driven mad by his love for Layla. Sufis later adapted the story, taking Layla as a metaphor for God.

There, in an empty gymnasium in Khan Younis, I witnessed a teenage Qays wade through imaginary desert sands, looking for Layla.

Gaza is flat, over-crowded, and on the Mediterranean Sea. Horses and people in full dress wade into the water. A cacophony of calls to prayer by neighboring mosques reverberate in the air. There are groves of palm trees in some parts, dirt-paved refugee camps in others, and hotels and restaurants on the beach in Gaza City luxurious enough to impress even me, a native New Yorker.

In 2002, the Israeli army destroyed fields of homes and staged aerial bombings. The heat was overwhelming. But even in this atmosphere, everywhere I filmed kids stopped by to give me their “hellos.” It was also at this time that Mohammed, a local theater director, joined me to help shoot my documentary; he took complete care of me while respecting my space as a woman. I didn’t pay him, give him a place to stay or even provide him with food. Unexpectedly, I fell in love with his immense kindness, his heroic commitment to art in a situation where most people are just trying to survive — that is to say, I fell in love with him.

The experience of seeing the children’s performance of Majnun Layla, and of finding love in Gaza, compelled me to retell the legend in the setting of modern-day Gaza. The film begins in 2001. Gaza has come under full closure — Palestinians are not allowed to travel in or out via Israel. Two college students who have been studying in the West Bank — Qays and Layla — have been forced to return to Gaza. There, within the limits of checkpoints and societal rules, Layla is inaccessible to Qays, and he descends into insanity.

Habibi provides a depiction of an evolving Palestinian society, focusing on a love affair and a poetic tradition while situating the story in the reality of Palestinian resistance. By bringing to film the poetic parable, I state that at the core of Arab society is a desire for an expression of love, not violence.Habibi’s protagonists struggle with a longing for romantic, divine love. It is this longing that makes their experience one that both Western and Islamic audiences can mutually understand.

It took me seven years just to be able to shoot Habibi. These years were personally dark, in which I endured many financial and emotional trials. During these years, I lost my love, Mohammed, and still spent every day trying to make a film inspired by my love affair and the classical romance ofMajnun Layla.

Back in the US, in 2003, I began drafting the script and fundraising for another trip to Gaza.

Finally, in 2005 I made it back to Gaza to shoot sample scenes. From the moment I stepped into Gaza, it was evident to me that things had drastically changed during my three-year absence. On this second trip, schoolgirls spat at me on the street; teenaged boys told Mohammed, “Take care of your woman.” Walking on my own, I heard men say, “How much is the meat?”

For me, the turn from an atmosphere where virtually no one paid attention to my uncovered hair in 2002, to an obsession in 2005 with my lack of cloth, was an indication of a rising Islamic traditionalism in reaction to an ongoing, deteriorating socio-economic crisis. Gaza — a place that is nine miles wide and 25 miles long, where more than 1.5 million people live — was and continues to be under full closure by Israel to other Palestinians, and to most foreigners. Some 55 percent of the population is unemployed (according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) and yet cannot leave to travel, for work or otherwise, to other parts of Palestine or elsewhere without Israeli permits.

The author and Mohammed shooting the film in Gaza in 2005. (Hala Aghaa)

Despite all this, in 2005 I encountered a willingness by Palestinians to appear in my film. I found volunteer actors and extras, and people generously gave me use of their farmland to reconstruct an Israeli checkpoint. With the generous help of the people of Gaza, I shot the sample scenes for Habibi.

I left in 2005 loving the Palestinians of Gaza. They took care of me, even though most had never seen my work before and I was not Palestinian.

The following fall I was in the Netherlands on a Fulbright fellowship, working with Ihab Saloul, who is from Gaza and was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam. Together we discussed Gaza, my storyline, and the implications of the story I was telling.

At the start of the Fulbright, Mohammed confronted me with the question of if we would ever have a future together. I hoped to use his and my contacts to reunite in the Netherlands. I wanted him to get out of Gaza because I wanted him to have a safer, easier life, but for various reasons, these hopes were dashed. In the end, he said to me, “I was born in Gaza and I will die in Gaza.” Soon after, he married someone else.

My own personal mourning only further propelled me to write the script, itself the story of tragic love. Ihab, who met with me almost weekly, was priceless in helping me get through the writing process. By the end of my Fulbright tenure, I had a shooting script. I began working on the next big hurdle: looking for a producer for the film.

In general, it was hard convincing any producer that a project to be shot in Gaza was a safe investment. So I decided to produce it myself. It took me two years to raise enough money to shoot in Gaza.

In March 2007 I arrived in Jerusalem. The Israeli authorities at the Erez crossing bordering Israel and the Gaza Strip claimed to have lost my paperwork on three separate occasions, so my request for a permit would instead go to the Ministry of the Interior. It was now a waiting game.

I began fearing that I might not ever get into Gaza. I began to ask myself: “Why not shoot Habibi in the West Bank and ’48?” (’48 being the Palestinian territory formally recognized as Israel). Why not? Looking back on film history, hundreds of films have faked locations, from Apocalypse Now to Robin Hood.

I didn’t get into Gaza in 2007. So I decided to make filming in the West Bank and ’48 my goal and began fundraising to make that happen.

In 2009, when a grant that I had unsuccessfully applied for five years in a row finally came through, I had enough funding to shoot a very low-budget movie.

I decided to do everything I could to make Gaza a reality for production. Not just because of the way Gaza looked, sounded and felt — but because I felt a yearning for Gaza. Many people there had been behind me from the start: working for free, giving me their homes, food, time and trust. Since 2002, Gaza had given me something to work towards, to have passion for — I wanted to give back.

I didn’t get into Gaza in 2009.

Filming in the West Bank was difficult because of the limited scope of field that we could include in the image. Most buildings in Ramallah (where we were based) have Jerusalem stone in the facade. Jerusalem stone is rarely used in Gaza. The West Bank is mountainous; Gaza is flat and by the sea. The film is set in 2001, when Gaza was dotted with buildings destroyed by bullets, shelling and bombings. The West Bank, thankfully, is not as ravaged.

In order to film Gaza beach scenes, we needed lead actors who could travel to the Mediterranean Sea in Israel and also work in the West Bank. I therefore sought and cast Palestinians with valid Israeli IDs. The beach scenes were filmed in Jaffa. For exteriors, we decided on Jericho, because it is flat. The rest of the scenes were shot in Ramallah and Birzeit. Later, while editing the film, I will incorporate archival footage shot by James Longley in 2001 in Gaza to show the truly catastrophic landscape that I could not fake in the West Bank or ’48.

I mourned shooting in the West Bank and ’48. I longed not only for the location of Gaza and the actors there, but also for the unique energy of the people of Gaza. In Gaza in 2005, I not only perceived that the cast and crew welcomed Habibi as the opportunity to make a Gazan film, but I also sensed a shared hunger for the experience of making a dramatic film set on the ground in Gaza. It was this hunger that I missed in the West Bank and ’48.

The West Bank and ’48 Palestinian cast and crew worked hard, but their spirits were different from those I worked with in Gaza. After all, they had never even been to Gaza: How could they be as committed in emotion to a place they’d never seen, to people they’d never met? And for many of the West Bank/’48 cast and crew, Habibi was, in part, just another industry experience.

I left Palestine via Jordan, where interrogation was light and no one took away the hard drives that stored the film.

On the seven-year-long journey to make Habibi, there were so many times I wanted to quit. But I didn’t, for reasons that changed over the years. At first I couldn’t quit because I thought of Habibi as an expressive conduit for myself and for Mohammed and other artists in Gaza. Then, I held steadfast to the film as an elegy to my love affair and as an homage to the greatness of Arabic literature. By 2008, the war that raged on against Gaza made it even more pressing that I present my version of Gaza on the big screen in hopes of humanizing Palestinian victims of Israeli violence in Gaza.

But the real reason I didn’t quit is as simple as this: every time I was close to dropping the project, someone else popped up to help me with it. After Mohammed left, Ihab mentored me through the writing process. When I could no longer enter Gaza, friends in the West Bank and ’48 stepped in for production. When I couldn’t get a producer for the project, grantors and donors supported me as the producer. I could continue to work on Habibibecause of all the people who had committed to the project. It was no longer my film to stop working on. It was — and is — a film I share with the people who have entrusted me to work on it. Even as I edit the film here in my cool, dark apartment in rainy Amsterdam, I imagine you, dear reader, sitting in the audience. I imagine your support behind the film.

Susan Youssef is an Amsterdam- and New York City-based filmmaker. You can follow her at @susanyoussef on Twitter or become a fan of Habibi Rasak Kharban on Facebook.

Jerusalem Post
Nathan Burstein
17/05/2007 10:37

Government-funded Rabinovitch Foundation will not participate in the financing of director Eyal Sivan’s Jaffa.

A fiercely anti-Zionist director will not receive taxpayer money to make a film for Israel’s next Independence Day, Ma’ariv reported Wednesday. According to the report, the government-funded Rabinovitch Foundation will not participate in the financing of director Eyal Sivan’s Jaffa, a proposed documentary that would have explored the changing public image of Israel and the Jaffa brand of oranges during the country’s six-decade history. The film, which had already received the approval of the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the Channel 8 documentary network, would have aired on Channel 8 near Israel’s 60th Independence Day next year. Opposition to the film grew ferociously last month after it was announced Sivan was the frontrunner among 10 directors seeking government funding for an Independence Day documentary. Born in Haifa and raised in Jerusalem, the director moved to France in the mid-1980s and has served as an increasingly vocal critic of Israel ever since. The director signed a public statement last summer blasting IDF operations against Hizbullah in Lebanon and Kassam launchers in Gaza as examples of Israeli “brutality and cruelty.” Earlier this year, Sivan lectured at “Israeli Apartheid Week” in London, delivering a speech on “Zionism, Israeli Media and Rationalizing Racist Consciousness.” The controversial director hasn’t been without Israeli supporters, however. Israeli filmmakers were divided in their response Wednesday to the Rabinovitch Foundation’s decision, with some praising the announcement and others describing it as an infringement on Sivan’s freedom of speech.

Elia Suleiman

Nazareth-born filmmaker Elia Suleiman is one of the darlings of Cannes and stands out from the pack of contemporary Palestinian filmmakers for his unique style of filmmaking based on sewing together a series vignettes, silence — an emphasis on visual storytelling versus dialogue, and deadpan comedy found in often grim humor in the lives of everyday people living under the tyranny of what he calls a “pathetic occupation.”

Suleiman’s latest film, The Time That Remains (2009), which premiered at the last Cannes Film Festival, marks the end of what has been described as his “Palestinian film trilogy,” beginning with Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996); the much-acclaimed Divine Intervention (2002) which was Palestine’s official submission to the Academy Awards that year (but denied entry because “Palestine is not a country” — although the following year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reneged and accepted it as a submission from the “Palestinian Authority”); and concluding with The Time That Remains. The Time That Remains broke the French box office’s top ten list last summer and has garnered much acclaim on the festival circuit. The Electronic Intifada contributor Sabah Haider interviewed Elia Suleiman and discussed a broad range of topics

from his new film to the human experience and the quest for justice in this world.

Sabah Haider: The title of your new film is The Time That Remains. How would you explain the title; time is running out for what?

Elia Suleiman: I would say that the title is a warning sign. I cannot say that the time is running out — I don’t have authority over time. I can say that it’s a warning sign about a certain feel of the experience that we, whoever we are, might be living. The Time That Remains is a sense of my feeling, I feel it might be the feelings of others — it’s a warning sign regarding a global situation.

SH: What warning are you communicating?

ES: Of things running out. Of time running out. Of the fact that maybe it’s already too late. From the melting ice to the cleansing of any form of justice.

SH: Is the Arab-Israeli conflict is a microcosm of this?

ES: Yes, I used to use exactly that saying. Yes you could, if you want, definitely one keeps on rephrasing. Now I see that we have gone a step

further. In my opinion I think that this microcosm is everywhere, so I don’t know if the microcosm of the Arab-Israeli conflict is a reflection of the world, or if the world is a microcosm of Palestine.

There is a microcosm everywhere of every conflict, every centimeter that we are now traveling. I do not believe that there is one microcosm to reflect the world, because every place in the world has become a microcosm of its own conflict.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is the world’s conflict and vice-versa, so I don’t know what is a microcosm of what anymore, because globally, Palestine

has multiplied and generated into so many Palestines. Because I feel if you go to Peru, you will find Palestine in a grave state there too.

SH: Are you referring to the fragmented Diaspora?

ES: I’m not talking about Palestinians. I’m talking about all conflicts and all regressions and all pollutions and the [global economic] crash, and globalization. In fact, The Time That Remains is not at all a metaphor of Palestine. Not at all.

SH: Is the Arab-Israeli conflict a symbol of the degeneration of society?

ES: I’m not saying anything about the Arab-Israeli conflict, see what I mean? I do not make a film in order to talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, the phrase the Arab-Israeli conflict does not even belong in my dictionary — at all. I only reflect and sponge and experience, and that happens to be as a Palestinian Diasporic — or everyday reality. An occupation of some sorts. A different kind of an occupation. An occupation of the geography of Palestine, and an occupation of the souls of those who live there.

This is a reality that is being experienced everywhere in the world, and not necessarily just Palestinians. I’m saying it’s an experience that can be

identified with everywhere in the world. We live in a place called “the globe” today that has a multiplicity of experiences in it. My films do not talk about Palestine necessarily. They are Palestine because I am from that place — I reflect my experience, but in identification with all the Palestines that exist. The word “Arab-Israeli conflict” is alien to me in terms of the poetics of the word. I don’t think my film is about that altogether.

SH: Can you explain your view that Palestine represents all of the conflicts of the world?

ES: I think there is an identification. Look, when you are an artist, you should have faith that first of all your experience is not local; it is a universal experience. That’s one. When you compose an image you should never think about the boundaries of that image. But should this image exist in one locale, it should transgress the boundaries of that locale. So that means that if an Uruguayan is watching my film, and has an identification with the story of Fouad in the film, then this is where I believe I have traveled an experience, a universality of some sort, which I think cinema is up for. So this is not about molding or summing up an experience located in Palestine. This is about all the experiences that can

be conceptually, Palestinian-ally, called so.

When I make a film, I do not have any impulse, when I’m composing an image, of raising the consciousness of the world about Palestine. If, by de facto, the spectator feels an identification to the story of Palestine, that is when I’ll be achieving something. And if they go home and change a certain something to the better of the world, in their own locale, then they have been in my opinion, I would say, very pro-Palestinian.

If they took pleasure when watching the film, and went home and had a kind of positivity or an intuition or desire to aestheticize their dinner

table, they have, as far as I’m concerned, went a step further to becoming pro-Palestinian. I will not even believe that if they went and started to demonstrate, that this would be an achievement for me. I think each individual, when they watch a film of mine, that when it will be flattering me is when they have certain impulses of a positive construction, of a better life of their own. As individuals, and as communities, and that is for me then, a pro-Palestinian experience.

The term “Palestinian cinema” is not just used to describe the films made by Palestinian filmmakers, but it’s now used describe films that represent a Palestinian perspective. I don’t know what that is. What is a Palestinian perspective?

SH: Contemporary films that tell of Palestinian experiences — would you say these films construct a national identity for the fragmented Diaspora?

ES: Certainly not mine. Personally, I do not adhere to Palestinian national identity. I may adhere to an identification, but not an identity. The

experience of my films do not construct or adhere to what an identity can be defined as. Expulsion? Expulsion is shared by so many histories. A kuffiyeh? A kuffiyeh became a political symbol in intifada times. Some cynics might have been right in defining a counter-effect to an occupation.

Look at who actually constructs national identities in the world — not necessarily those who are under occupation, but those who are into occupation. Take for example, Israel, who even goes to steal the falafel to make that part of their national identity. What is the force behind that sort of pathetic, obsessive search for any form of a national identity in Israel? More occupation? Definitely. More expansion. Definitely. First it was the falafel, then it became the hummus. I think they’re absolutely pathetic.

Why do we have to run after what is by de facto part of our culture — food or embroidery or kuffiyehs — and why do we have to overemphasize dancing dabke as if this symbolizes that the land is ours, but simply beating it? I do not believe in those things. If there was to be any such thing as a national identity with an identification of that, I think then I would say it has to be so elastic it would never have to be within any static borders.

Because if we start to say that “this is us, until here, and the rest is them or other” that means we have put ourselves into our own ghetto and nailed ourselves to the ground, while if our national identity is expansive in terms of the seduction and pleasure of being others, then our national identity can enhance so much of the world’s experience.

I said it a long time ago — if, for the sake of strategy, and only if, I would be fighting today in sympathy of the Palestinian people to have an

independent state, what does that mean? Am I such a lover of any kind of statehood? Do I so much admire any kind of police force, government and institutionalized powers? It is only so that the Israeli tank leaves the doorsteps of the school where the children are entering. Why a state, then? Why raise a flag? Only because it’s a symbol of the freedom that the Palestinians are trying to attain.

Lets say that the Palestinian state raised the flag, it built the borders, and we had a certain amount of freedom, a certain amount of less oppression — what if this state is not necessarily the kind of state we’d adhere to, in terms of justice and democracy, even though it achieved a liberation of some sort? Will I still be supporting a Palestinian state? No I will not. If it becomes another oppressive authority, I will be fighting it

nonetheless. I will be fighting to lower the flag. In fact I said once, if this is one strategy, I will be fighting until the flag has risen. But then I will be fighting to lower that flag again, because I do not believe — nor in flags, nor in linear identities. I believe in multiplicities of and diversities of cultures. So I am not for a two state solution. I never had compassion for this sort of idea. Not only that, but the fact that politically, socially, humanly, morally, it’s not just.

SH: Your films focus on a loss of hope and of melancholy resignation. Do they represent a loss of hope that exists within the Palestinian community, both under occupation and in the Diaspora?

ES: I think by de facto, that the very act of the making of a film, is an act emerging from hope. So questions that surround hopelessness are in contradiction to the actual fact that there is a film. If I was hopeless, I would not have made a film entitled The Time That Remains, so I don’t think that this question applies to my being, because I think that there is hope. There is only hope. Otherwise I wouldn’t be making films. I’m not in a post-apocalypse ambience. We’re not sitting with … gas masks.

The Time That Remains is a kind of warning about the regression of the status quo, or the regression of the state of things. You warn because there is hope. And when you compose an aesthetic image, the pleasure is not morbid. I’m not living in a ghostly ambience. It is based in only hope. I can tell you at the same time that the space of this form of reflexivity, of meditation of pleasure, of the positivity to destabilize the authorities that are aggressing [against] us; those who want any form of a better life is shrinking. We are not necessarily winning. We are only trying to arrest the regression, unfortunately. And the powers that are trying to shrink our aspiration for democracy are greater than our

imagination.

SH: Of the films being made today that propel a counter Israeli perspective, do you feel they construct an efficient form of resistance?

ES: Are there works of art that form this form of resistance? Like my films? I think Palestinians are included, at the forefront, having to face the

everyday reality of occupation and oppression. And still be able to, actually, with so little space and so little possibility, to express themselves aesthetically, they are definitely at the forefront. I don’t think they’re so particularly special in the aesthetic department. I think the total sum of aesthetic attempts everywhere, participate in the liberation of Palestine as well as the liberation of all occupations.

SH: So do you believe Palestinian cinema is a form of resistance?

ES: Not necessarily just Palestinian, but I think that cinema, a certain cinema, is a form of resistance. Especially when it is the habitat of a certain

moral questioning; of a certain place and pleasure and inspiration of a certain democratic framing, it becomes a form of resistance evidently. The fact that we are trying, we are crossing the boundaries and transgressing these boundaries, we are also trying to communicate to others a form of resistance to stop the regression by itself — by de facto. Palestinian cinema, the term must be used precisely — because it can be used by our adversaries in order to lock us in. What’s the use? We know we are Palestinians.

SH: What is your opinion on cultural boycott? Do you support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel?

ES: I really started to have a process of self-evaluation and of defining and redefining this word … I see a lot of justice in the academic boycott in the historic moment that it is happening vis-a-vis what Israel has been doing lately. I think this is definitely an interesting move and an interesting [course of] action … It has destabilized the institution of Zionist practice somewhere, because really they are so obnoxious, the Israelis — the Israeli institution and the government. … I [do] have a problem with boycotts of anything, any time, when it starts to kill the good, the bad and the ugly. And this is the problem that I have been facing with some of these boycotts — not the academic one, by the way, because for some reason I have felt there is a lot more thought and strategy [in it] — and I have been in dialogue with some of the pioneers of this boycott, and I have discussed with them, what I would consider my reservations about it.

Sabah Haider is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Beirut. She can be reached at sabafhaider A T gmail D O T com.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are writing to invite you to take part at the fifth edition of the Sole Luna, International Documentary Film Festival on Mediterranean and Islamic Cultures.

The Festival will take place in Palermo (Italy) from July 18th to 25th 2010.
The entry form is available on line: www.solelunaunpontetraleculture.com. In our web
site, you will also find all the useful information you need to participate to the festival.

The deadline for submitting your entries is 15th April 2010.

Best regards

The staff

By Elaine Pasquini

[Najwa Najjar (l) discusses her film “Pomegranates and Myrrh” at the Arab Film Festival, and Ibrahim El-Batout accepts the Noor Award for best feature film for “Eye of the Sun.” (Staff photos P. Pasquini)]

THE 13TH ANNUAL Arab Film Festival held its opening night ceremony Oct. 15 at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. Master of Ceremonies Asaad Kelada inspired the audience, including several visiting filmmakers, with his encouraging comments. “Dreams can be realized if we believe in who we are, in our distinct voice and identity, and in the richness of our culture,” the acclaimed Hollywood-based director and producer averred. “Nothing can stop us from moving forward if we truly believe in our dreams.”

During its 10-day run, the festival screened 41 films from 22 countries in theaters in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose and Los Angeles.

Following Kelada’s opening remarks, executive director Michel Shehadeh, along with the festival’s seven jurors, presented the Noor Awards for best films. Award-winners were Ibrahim El-Batout’s “Eye of the Sun” (Egypt, 2008, Feature Fiction, $2,000), Jean Marie Offenbacher’s “Tea on the Axis of Evil” (Syria, 2009, Feature Documentary, $2,000), Ahmad Habash’s “Fatenah” (Palestine, 2009, Short Fiction, $500), Laila El-Haddad and Saeed Taji’s Farouky’s “Tunnel Trade” (Palestine, UK, 2007, Short Documentary, $500). Honorable Mention awards were presented to Philip Rizk for his short documentary, “This Palestinian Life” (Egypt, Palestine, USA, 2008), and to Nour-Eddine Lakhmari for his fiction feature, “Casanegra” (Morocco, 2008).

Guests then enjoyed a screening of Najwa Najjar’s “Pomegranates & Myrrh.” The Palestinian filmmaker’s first feature film explores real-life issues facing her countrymen who live under Israeli occupation and suffer illegal land confiscations, unwarranted imprisonments and vicious attacks by settlers. Filmed in the Palestinian territories and with a mostly Palestinian crew, Najjar juxtaposes scenes of the heroine, Kamar, visiting her husband in an Israeli prison and conferring with her lawyer (played by leading Israeli human rights attorney Leah Tsemel), with scenes in a Ramallah dance studio where the young wife continues with her dance classes and rehearsals for an upcoming performance. The attentions of a visiting choreographer further complicate Kamar’s unsettled situation. Najjar intentionally left aspects of the plot ambiguous to force her audience to think about the issues she presents. Answering a viewer’s question about unresolved incidents in the film, Najjar responded, ”What do you think?” One “thought” the audience carried with them was that the independent film deserves mass distribution for viewing by international audiences in mainstream theaters.

The evening ended with a screening of Marc Abi Rached’s debut feature, “Help,” which delves starkly into social taboos.
Ibrahim El-Batout’s Candid Q & A

Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim El-Batout opened a window into his soul during the question-and-answer period following the screening of his award-winning film, “Eye of the Sun,” at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza Cinema.

The powerful story of contemporary life, set in Cairo’s impoverished Ein Shams neighborhood, explores such universal issues as political corruption, social inequities, pollution, and environmentally caused terminal illnesses.

“I’m a filmmaker, not a politician,” El-Batout said. “I think my underlying motive in making the film and what I tried to portray is the amount of oppression and corruption in the world, which needs to be changed. I have questions, but no answers. And I’m sharing these questions and hoping that together we can make a better world, because it doesn’t make sense what’s happening around us—from wars, to killings, to damaging the earth.”

One viewer asked El-Batout, who from 1987 to 2004 made documentaries, about the value of making a documentary versus fiction for confronting the issues he presented. The former correspondent, who covered 12 wars in 18 years, responded: “The public has become very fatigued, especially about war. I believed there must be a different way of making reality a bit acceptable. There is a cinematic language where you can get the best out of both genres, but it remains a work in process.”

Regarding his inspiration for making the film, El-Batout explained, “I specialized in covering war. After living through 12 wars, I was personally very confused. I was caught in a vicious circle and to get out of it I needed a lot of energy and a lot of therapy. For me, making this film is part of my healing process…We had no written script in the classical form, and the story was changing all the time.”

None of the cast or crew was paid, and the film was made for $6,000.

“Cinema is changing toward a new visual language,” El-Batout concluded. “I think we will discover it along the way.”

“The Other Half of the Sky”

[Tunisian filmmaker Kalthoum Bornaz (l), and Jean Marie Offenbacher, accepting the Noor Award for best feature documentary for “Tea on the Axis of Evil.” (Staff photo P. Pasquini)]

One of the more controversial films at the Arab Film Festival was “The Other Half of the Sky,” Kalthoum Bornaz’s 93-minute feature about Tunisia’s inheritance law, which elicited a lively discussion between the audience and the filmmaker following its Berkeley screening.

The main characters, 20-year-old brother and sister twins whose mother died giving birth to them, live with their attorney father, who still struggles with the loss of his wife. One day Sélima discovers that upon their father’s death her brother will receive more of his estate than she will. Responding to his daughter’s questioning him about this, he quotes the Qur’anic verse on which the law is based. “This unambiguous verse cannot be interpreted any differently,” he states.

“My film created a big debate and everyone was talking about it,” Bornaz commented. “Since life has changed since the time of the Prophet Mohammed, we have many discussions about this.”

Asked if Tunisians want to break with Islamic law, she responded, “No. We are Muslims.” The inheritance law, she claimed, is the only major controversial legislation. Otherwise, she said, Tunisian women have the same rights as men.
“Tea on the Axis of Evil”

“Syria is a complete black hole. Most Europeans and Americans don’t know anything about it,” Jean Marie Offenbacher said following the screen-ing of her award-winning documentary, “Tea on the Axis of Evil.” The New York-based filmmaker moved to Syria in 2004 because she was “tired of sitting and crying and feeling enraged when I read what was printed in The Washington Post and The New York Times,” she explained. “So I decided to move there, see what it was like and record ordinary life. I noticed that the moment we invaded Iraq the White House started describing Syria and Iran in precisely the same terms they had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. I realized that Syria and Iran were next on the hit list.”

In her 67-minute film, Offenbacher gives voice to the average Syrians she encountered while traveling in cities and in the desert. Taxi drivers, shopkeepers, desert-dwellers, and others discussed their dreams, as well as their daily lives. She learned their views on dating, marriage, education, art, politics and religion. Syrian Minister of Expatriates Butheina Sha’aban expounded on gender equality, while teenagers discoursed on fashion, including whether or not to wear the hijab.

“I think there is a thirst for information about Syria,” the independent filmmaker said, “and I’m happy to be contributing to dispel the wrong notions people have about the country where I met so many kind, warm-hearted people. I wanted to take the microphone away from the radicals and fringe and give it to the people in the center who represent the majority, and that’s what my film is about.”

Arab Cultural Festival

[Qaba’el al-Yemen dancers perform at the Arab Cultural Festival. (Staff photo P. Pasquini)]

On Oct. 11 some 4,000 visitors attended the Arab Cultural and Community Center’s 15th annual festival in Golden Gate Park. Festivalgoers enjoyed Iraqi maqam songs by Saadoun Al-Bayati and Moroccan gnawa music by Yassir Chadly, Bouchaib Abdelhadi and Ensemble. Other entertainers included Qaba’el al-Yemen, hip-hop artist Cherif Triki, and the Ajyal Ensemble, featuring Nazir Latouf and Faisal Zedan. The daylong event also featured a booth bazaar, children’s activities and Middle Eastern cuisine.

Elaine Pasquini is a free-lance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Amreeka chronicles the adventures of Muna, a single mother who leaves the West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in the promised land of small town Illinois. In America, as her son navigates high school hallways the way he used to move through military checkpoints, the indomitable Muna scrambles together a new life cooking up falafel burgers as well as hamburgers at the local White Castle.

Told with heartfelt humor by writer-director Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, Amreeka is a universal journey into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers caught between their heritage and the new world in which they now live and the bittersweet search for a place to call home.

Amreeka recalls Dabis’ family memories of their lives in rural America during the first Iraq War. The film stars Haifa-trained actress Nisreen Faour as Muna, and Melkar Muallen plays her 16-year-old son, Fadi. Also in the cast are Hiam Abbass, Alia Shawkat, Yussef Abu-Warda and Joseph Ziegler. Written and directed by Cherien Dabis Amreeka was produced by Christina Piovesan and Paul Barkin. Alicia Sams, Dabis and Gregory Keever were executive producers; Liz Jarvis and Al-Zain Al-Sabah were co-producers.

National Geographic Entertainment will release Amreeka in September 2009.Amreeka is a First Generation Films-Alcina Pictures-Buffalo Gal Pictures/Eagle Vision Media Group Production, presented by E1 Entertainment in association with Levantine Entertainment, Rotana Studios and Showtime Arabia.

Amreeka made its world premiere in dramatic competition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and played as Opening Night of New Directors/New Films, a co-presentation of The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Amreeka made its debut internationally in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

“‘Cherien Dabis’s “Amreeka” stands alongside “The Visitor” and “Maria Full of Grace” as one of the most accomplished recent films about a non·European immigrant coming to the United States.”
— the New York Times
“The strength of “Amreeka” is its ability to take on a fraught situation and avoid both stridency and sentimentality…”
— the Los Angeles Times

Directed By: Cheren Dabis
Drama | 2009 | USA | 96 minutes
English & Arabic with English Subtitles

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Tribeca 09 screened two Arab features as part of its out of competition slate: Annemarie Jacir‘s Salt Of This Sea and Franco-Algerian director Lyès Salem’s Masquerades.

Salem is the newest member of a vibrant, talented new generation of Algerian filmmakers (all of whom are under 45) that includes Tariq Teguia (Inland/Gabbla), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (Adhen/Dernier Maquis), and Malek Bensmaïl (La Chine Est Encore Loin).

Masquerades is a completely engaging satire. It won numerous first place awards last year on the Arab Film Fest circuit – Best First Film in Carthage, Best Arabic Film in Cairo, and the Muhr Arabic Feature Best Film in still purse-rich Dubai (despite the weakening of the Gulf emirate’s real estate market), where the French-Algerian production also won that particular event’s first ever FIPRESCI prize.

Previously, Salem had also scooped up awards for his two other films, both shorts: the 2001 Golden Star in Marrakesh, for Jean Farès, and the 2005 César, for Cousines.

Set in Aurès, a Berber village in the mountains of East Algeria, Masquerades is one sly dog of a movie.

Initially, it is apparently nothing but a delicious – and harmless – wedding farce. Salem at first seems intent on nothing more than puncturing Algerian machismo posturing, and the cultural values of a society that overvalues all things European.

The film revolves around the deeply insecure figure of Mounir (Salem), a puffed up gardener, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ali G, is perpetually dressed in tracksuit, and prefers to refer to his lowly occupation as that of a “horticulture engineer”.

Mounir works for the richest man in town (an unseen Colonel), is married, and has a beautiful narcoleptic sister Rym (Sarah Reguieg), who suffers from a tendency to pass out, suddenly, in the most inappropriate circumstances. Because of her condition, Mounir endures much cruel mocking by the villagers regarding Rym’s potential suitability as a wife.

Their incessant persiflage finally drives him over the edge. One night, he cannot take it any more, gets drunk, and grandly announces to the village her impending nuptials to a wealthy Frenchman, a certain William Van Cooten, whom he has seen briefly on TV. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Rym is madly in love with Khliffen (Mohamed Bouchaïb), a neighbour, and Mounir’s best friend.

As word spreads around town concerning this impending phantom marriage, Mounir suddenly becomes an honoured man in the village. People who once shunned or made fun of his station in life begin to shower him with gifts. Rym goes along with Mounir’s slip of tongue in order to force Khliffen to propose, and the rest of the film revolves around Mounir’s attempts to resolve his dilemma with honour.

Masquerades is in part a hilarious variant on the long-standing French vaudeville tradition of quiproquo (Salem’s original screenplay was titled Les Trois Mensonges, or, The Three Lies), or the misunderstood word. Appreciating its deft sense of humour is only enhanced by knowing both Arabic and French, as there are some truly funny cross-language puns here; although by no means is this necessary to enjoying the film. It has affinities with Egyptian comedies of the Sixties, and recalls most directly veteran Algerian auteur Merzak Allouache’s groundbreaking Omar Gatlato (1976).

But there is more to Masquerades than breezy social satire. What Salem has succeeded in doing is create a metaphor for Algeria – a country that many young people want to abandon in search for work and a better life in Europe, a country that is controlled by an aging oligarchy, a country that was racked in the Nineties by a long-running civil war that resulted in the death of 160,000 people, a country where broadcast media is strictly controlled, a place where cinemas are few and censorship rampant, a country where movie directors have faced death threats by radical Islamists.

If Algeria has fallen asleep from time to time, since its independence in 1962 from France, when will it wake up for good?

Salem’s movie gently hints at one possible answer to that question.

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