We hoped to raise funds by asking many people to each give a little. It was a straightforward tangible and practical plan. Its success corresponds to the positive responses of people who want to see how film can change our lives and the world around us. Today, we are deeply inspired by the brilliant spirit of the ‘power of many’ in Tunisia and Egypt to gear up.

The Arab Film Festival’s mission celebrates and elevates our communities. The whole purpose of the Power of Many campaign is to prove that the AFF is people-powered; many of us together can accomplish what few of us alone cannot. As little as $10 a year from each of us could bring the festival to a new level. You have the power to make a difference; please use it.

Last year, the goal was to raise $25k by asking 7,000 people on our mailing list to give at least $10 each. We figured that if one third of the people responded positively, we would transcend that goal. The campaign raised around $5000; one fifth of the goal. A modest but encouraging beginning!

We will keep the same goal this year believing in a better outcome for many reasons. Our contact list is bigger now-we’ve reached 11,000. The economy scare has subsided somewhat, but most importantly because we are inspired by the spirit coming from Egypt and Tunisia that together we can do anything.

This must work! What would stop anyone from giving an annual $10 gift to help our community get the respect it deserves? The reasons that I could think of are:

- Tapped out. “I contributed all I could to other causes.” Ok good reason. If you can stretch further by $10, then your place in heaven is guaranteed

- Laziness. “I read it and don’t want to bother with it.” It doesn’t take much-just a few clicks on the internet and it’s done.

- Miser. Can’t help with this one. Hard to change this personality characteristic.

- Pessimist. “$10 is not worth donating.”The truth is it can easily become $70,000 if everyone responds.

- Denial. “I don’t have $10, don’t like films, and don’t know who you are.” Come on, don’t be that way, you know you love us deep down inside!

Seriously though, film is a powerful tool. It can entertain, inspire, educate, and positively transform attitudes. Used properly film can tell stories that teach us to be better, and showcase the important cultural narratives that people often do not have access to by simply watching their local news program. Improperly used, however, film can promote ignorance and hatred. We’ve all seen enough of that already. The films we present demonstrate our shared humanity and stand in the face of negative stereotyping and xenophobia.

$10 is less than 3 cents a day for a year or the cost of just five cups of coffee (not even a latte), and it is tax-deductible!

The Arab Film Festival is an important cultural treasure, a force of community, a place of heritage, and a unique space for arts and culture. It’s worth your support.

I don’t know what else can be said to inspire you to click right now and give us $10, except to tell you that your donation will make all the difference in the world for the Arab Film Festival’s success.

Regards,

Michel Shehadeh,

Executive Director
Arab Film Festival

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2011/festival-reports/moroccan-cinema-alive-the-12th-festival-national-du-film-tangier/

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By Alia Yunis

When AlYazyah Al Falasi and Reema Majed came to me last year to say they wanted to do a Middle East student film festival as their senior project, I felt a familiar dread. Having worked in public relations at film festivals from Cannes to Los Angeles when I was not that much older than them, I remembered the sleepless nights of preparation, the multiple egos to juggle, the disturbingly friendly former Mossad agents working as body guards, and the constant whir and buzz of media and aspiring actors chasing actors, directors, and producers to whom “ thank you” was a foreign word no matter where they were. It was a job I couldn’ t wait to get fired from.

But AlYazyah and Reema were two incredibly bright students and so determined. The Zayed University Film Festival (ZUFF) did involve many sleepless nights, but in the end, the two pulled off an incredible two days of screenings. They did roll out a red carpet here in Abu Dhabi, but more importantly ZUFF gave a look into the Arab youth through
the eyes of some very creative young filmmakers.

Arab youth have the highest rate of unemployment in the world, and many have lived through at least one war, not to mention the ravages of corrupt governments. The festival received 70 films from universities across the Middle East, so many of which dealt gracefully with these issues and their side effects on families, marriage, and most of all hope. Grand to prize went to Lebanon’ s Naji Bechara for “ Talk to the Brain,” a satire on the repressiveness of secondary school education, Best Narrative Short went to Jordan’ s Amjad Al Rashid “ Bitter Days,” a heartbreaking story of a little girl’ s life on the street as a shoe shiner, and Best Documentary went to Qatar’ s Sharoukh Al Shaheen for “ Lady of the Rosary,” a multifaceted look at the building of Qatar’ s first church. Jordan’ s Abdul Salam Al Haj received an Audience Favorite award for “ Yousef,” the bittersweet tale of a young man whose only connection to his late mother is her radio. Zayed University is proud to show this window onto Arab society in San Francisco.

“ The Best of ZUFF” will play at the following venues, followed by a discussion via satellite with the students here in Abu Dhabi:

San Francisco State University on Tuesday, October 19 at 6:30 p.m.
UC Berkeley (International House) on Thursday, October 21 at 7:00 p.m.

* Alia Yunis teaches film at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi and served as the faculty advisor for ZUFF. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, “ The Night Counter” (Random House 2010)

Friday, October 8, 2010
Jonathan Curiel, Special to The Chronicle

A dusty village in southeast Algeria is the setting for the comic film “Masquerades,” which centers on the relationships between a man named Mounir, his narcoleptic sister and the sister’s secret love – who happens to be Mounir’s best friend. The movie, which opens the Arab Film Festival on Thursday at the Castro Theatre, was Algeria’s submission for a 2009 best foreign film Oscar.

Lyès Salem, 37, who plays Mounir, also directed “Masquerades” and co-wrote the script. Born and raised in Algeria, Salem moved as a teenager to France, where he attended the prestigious French National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Paris. Salem’s 2005 short film, “Cousines,” won a French César Award. Among his many acting roles: a guard in Steven Spielberg‘s 2005 movie “Munich.” “Masquerades” is Salem’s first full-length feature as director.

Q: In the film, Mounir is his sister’s guardian and tries to arrange her marriage – by claiming she has a rich and successful suitor. Her secret love, Khliffa, is poor but creative. The sister, Rym, is constantly falling asleep, but she and her sister-in-law often have the upper hand with the film’s men. You’ve said the characters represent the friction between Algeria’s past traditions and more modern values.

A: Mounir thinks he has to guarantee the past. It’s an obligation for him, not something he chooses. The sister’s love (Khliffa) represents the future. He’s the only one who builds something in the film. He is the only character we see cry. For me, Rym’s handicap was poetic. It’s about the notion of dreams. She represents our country: Beautiful, smart when she’s awake, but she can’t capitalize because she’s always falling down asleep and has to start everything again.

Q: Audiences have reacted well to the humor, but some Arab film festivals have been unreceptive to “Masquerades.” Why?

A: In some festivals we sent the film to, there was distrust because “Masquerades” is a comedy. It’s like (Arab filmmakers) have an obligation to stick to certain subjects (like politics). We can’t make scary movies or comedies. It’s like we can’t make films like everyone else, like we can’t take some distance from reality and laugh about it. … For me, it was important for Algerian audiences to laugh about themselves. When we laugh about ourselves, we can think, too.

Q: Why did you want to be an actor?

A: When I was 7, I saw a French movie about the life of Molière. For me, it was a revelation, this guy who passed his life writing stories and performing in front of an audience, and spending all this time on the road, meeting people. So when I was 7, I began to say, “I want to be an actor.”

Q: You’ve acted in English-language, French-language and Arabic-language films, and have eclectic tastes in cinema. What Hollywood films do you like?

A: “The Party,” which stars Peter Sellers and was directed by Blake Edwards. “O Brother, Where Are Thou?” by the Coen brothers. And “Some Like It Hot,” with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. I like all of Billy Wilder‘s films.

Masquerades: 7:30 p.m. Thurs. Castro Theatre. 14th Arab Film Festival runs through Oct. 24. (415) 564-1100. www.arabfilmfestival.org.

E-mail comments to datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/07/MV5F1FOHQR.DTL#ixzz125cZ8oFq

by Angela Ramsey

Visiting the office of any arts organizations in the final frantic days before their capstone event, you would expect to find all the harried signs of production: mailing labels strewn across tables, co-workers huddled around computer screens in desperate discussions, perhaps even a local TV crew popping in for an interview. But in the case at hand, above the din of keyboards, discussions and telephone dialogues are the sounds of gunfire, the lilting tune of a strummed instrument, the laugh of two lovers. Welcome to the home of the Arab Film Festival which is at the Castro and Embarcadero Theaters from Thursday October 14 to Sunday the 17.

Created in 1996 as the first of its kind in the US, the Arab Film Festival is now America’s largest exhibitor of independent Arab movies showcasing the depth and diversity of Arab filmmakers from the Arab world and its diasporas. These independent filmmakers provide perspectives on Arab peoples, cultures, arts, history and politics through films not easily accessed in the US.

Arab Film Festival Executive Director, Michel Shehadeh. photo: D. BlairWhen I visited the festival’s office in San Francisco (it also has offices in San Jose and Los Angeles), a few people were sitting on sofas in the screening area, conferring on various scenes. Between dashing to answer a question from them and popping out to take phone calls, I was able to stop the energetic and impassioned Executive Director, Michel Shehadeh, for a few minutes, and ask him what were some of the distinctive elements this year.

“This year’s selections have set a record,” he said, grabbing a glass of water. “There is a groundbreaking program of films from more than 14 countries. Although Egypt and Morocco have the longest filmmaking history, we have films from Algeria, Canada, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and the USA. It has something for everyone. It includes powerful documentaries and compelling features and shorts. We’re proud to provide an Arab experience that is unique, entertaining, informative, insightful, and also challenging.”

When I pressed him for some of his personal highlights, Shehadeh said: “Well, of course, the opening night film ‘Masquerades’—it has won so many international awards. We will have the Algerian director, Lyes Salem, present for Q & A afterwards. This festival includes diversity in topics, from the social satire of ‘Masquerades,’ to ‘The String,’ a Tunisian film about social taboos, such as homosexuality, or the positive power of art therapy set in Lebanon’s first prison-based drama ’12 Angry Lebanese,’ by filmmaker Zeina Daccache.”

There are also some cutting-edge shorts, he said. On opening night, the festival will host its fourth annual Noor Awards ceremony. From the Arabic word for “light,” the Noor Awards were established to celebrate filmmakers whose enlightened and original works outshine others in their category: Best Feature, Best Documentary, Best Documentary Short, and Best Fiction Short. The jury consists of local and national film experts and academics.

To get some actual filmmaker feedback, I exchanged the blur of office activity for the quiet realm of online interviewing, by writing Amar Chebib, who lives in Canada. He is the writer and director of the short film, “The Butcher.” I noted that he packed many layers into his 23 minutes, weaving in many humorous moments in the relations between the butcher Mimoun and his customers. I also noticed, in the credits, the actor shares Chebib’s last name.

“The main character is actually my uncle with no previous acting experience,” Chebib told me. Indeed, “That is his real butchery in Noisy-le-Grand, France.” Chebib has a Canadian mother and Syrian father, but was raised throughout the Arabian-Persian Gulf; the setting of the film is urban France. I wondered if Mimoun’s challenges represent a universal issue amongst Arabs living abroad and whether he thought inter-generational tension within the Arab community was simply the pressures of modern global society versus traditional values?

You definitely picked up on some of the main themes I had in mind while making the film,” Chebib said. “Mimoun represents the grandfather Arab that attempts to preserve his culture and traditional values in a chaotic world that is constantly changing and seemingly under control by hostile forces—colonialism/westernization…and gentrification/construction. None of the youth speak Arabic, except a young boy. Mimoun feels it is his duty to remind them of their heritage and play a patriarchal role for them. However Mimoun’s clinging to his culture, identity, even traditional values/religion, is merely a comfort, not a solution. Ultimately the cultural crisis is the result of a greater spiritual crisis.”

No wonder Chebib’s film opens with Krishnamurti’s quote, juxtaposed against a construction site: “The day man experienced the consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to all other forms of life, he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction.”

“For me this quotation summarizes the underlying essence of ‘Le Boucher’: man’s feeling of separation from his environment is responsible for his misery and the current state of the world.”

You can join Amar for more Q&A at his screenings in San Francisco as well as filmmakers for Baram & Hamza,” “The Man Who Sold the World,” and “Cinecitta,” to name a few. The 14th Arab Film Festival will take place October 14th – 24th, 2010 at a variety of theaters in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose and Los Angeles. For the full schedule see the Arab Film Festival. Posted on Oct 06, 2010 – 05:03 PM

Now in our third year, the American University in Cairo will host a documentary film festival between March 18-26, 2011. Recognizing the need for more documentaries produced about and in the region to be made available to local audiences, this year’s program will feature documentary films specifically about social and cultural issues in the Middle East. Accordingly, we seek recently produced documentaries that utilize innovative ways to address social and cultural sites of contestation.

EGYPT RISING

Egypt Rising, the thematic focus for this year’s festival, thus aims to confront the unsophisticated stereotypes typically placed on Egypt. We seek films that challenge the way that the pharaonic past typically eclipses contemporary Egypt as well as to challenge the equally misguided claims that Egypt is culturally and socially ‘backwards’. Rather than an historical outlook, we are interested in the dawning horizon and what the future will bring to Egypt.

While we have particular interest in documentaries about Egypt for this year’s festival, we seek submissions from across the region. We are also interested in documentaries that focus on the Middle East in non-conventional locations, perhaps among diasporic or religious communities residing elsewhere. We will consider any film informed by the documentary tradition, but strongly encourage experimental work.

In addition to the new documentaries in the Egypt Rising program, we will also be featuring a retrospective of older work and work from outside Egypt, guest speakers and filmmakers, and panel discussions about the state of documentary in the Middle East and Egypt today.

For more information about the festival’s themes visit the Call for Films. For the submission form click here.

Call for Submissions due by

December 1, 2010.

WEBSITE: http://aucdocfest.blogspot.com/

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=143087022401854&ref=nf

EMAIL: aucdocfest@gmail.com

FESTIVAL DIRECTOR:

Mark R. Westmoreland
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Program in Sociology & Anthropology
The American University in Cairo

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.