News

Ramallah-based Palestinian cinema body Filmlab Palestine has unveiled the second edition of its ‘Palestinian Cinema Days Around The World’ initiative comprising 253 screenings of eight Palestinian films in 44 countries and over 150 cities this weekend.

The line-up includes Julia Bacha’s 2017 documentary Naila And The Uprising, charting the journey of Palestinian rights activist Naila Ayesh against the backdrop of the First Intifada in the late 1980s; Khaled Jarrar’s 2013 Chicago Best Doc winner Infiltrators, following Palestinians navigating Israeli check points, and Abdallah Al Khatib’s Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege, capturing the siege of the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus during the Syrian War, which saw most of its 160,000 inhabitants flee.

Further titles include Micheal Winterbottom and Mohammad Sawwaf’s doc Eleven Days in May, commemorating 67 children who were killed over the course of 11 days in a previous flare up in the conflict in May 2021; Carol Mansour’s 2023 work Aida Returns,...

To a Land Unknown.When Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown (2024) premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, its rapturous reception was a rare moment of solidarity in a festival environment that otherwise sought apoliticality. The only Palestinian film to be selected across all sections of the Cannes Film Festival, To a Land Unknown offered a vital link to an ongoing, real-world crisis, breaking the bubble of the festival landscape. Palestinian flags soared inside the theater at the film’s debut screening, while down the Croisette at the Théâtre Debussy, several journalists were asked to remove pin badges expressing their political commitments, some to the Palestinian cause and others to the labor activity of the festival workers. What use can a festival have in a time of genocide if it neither acknowledges political struggle nor centers stories by and about oppressed peoples? The story of two refugees, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and...

The Dupes.The August sun is a fierce weapon. Amidst the war, occupation, and destitution that form the backdrop of Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes (1972), it is the sun that ultimately represents the greatest danger to its Palestinian protagonists. Impoverished refugees searching for work, the three men attempt to cross the desert border from Iraq to an oil-abundant Kuwait. In a no-man’s-land too deadly to be policed, the trio must put their faith in a Palestinian smuggler to guide them through this trial of fire. The Dupes is set in 1958, ten years after the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to enable the creation of the state of Israel. Its three migrant characters represent different generations of Palestinians confronting this great dispossession, their paths converging in the Iraqi port city of Basra. Shifting between past and present, the narrative recollects their lives and losses, culminating...

Following Main Slate and Spotlight, the 61st New York Film Festival has unveiled its Revivals lineup, featuring new restorations of classic and overlooked films. Highlights include Manoel de Oliveira’s Abraham’s Valley, Jean Renoir‘s The Woman on the Beach, Bahram Beyzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog, Abel Gance’s La Roue, Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler, Lee Grant’s Tell Me a Riddle, Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints, Horace Ové’s Pressure, and more.

“This year’s edition of Revivals is a thrilling showcase of cinema history, packed with groundbreaking discoveries and long unseen classics alike, all in outstanding restorations,” said Florence Almozini, Senior Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center and NYFF Revivals Programmer. “We never cease to be amazed at the lasting influence of these cinematic gems on our collective sense of cinema, with the way they have tackled cultural, societal, or political issues with such modernity and artistry.

Greece’s Homemade Films has boarded Mahdi Fleifel’s upcoming feature “Men in the Sun,” currently in the final stages of development. The story, set in Athens, will deal with masculinity, exile and loss, showing young refugees in their 20s hustling to survive in the urban pressure cooker.

The company is also ready to start shooting Sofia Exarchou’s “Animal,” co-producing with Nabis Filmgroup, Ars Ltd., Digital Cube and Felony Productions.

Furthermore, its founder Maria Drandaki recently presented new projects at Venice Gap-Financing Market. “Arcadia,” directed by Yorgos Zois, will see Homemade Films joining forces with Foss Production and Red Carpet. “Titanic Ocean” by Konstantina Kotzamani will be shot in Japan and Singapore in 2023.

“I’m very excited to be working with this group of directors on a variety of different genres that span from drama to fantasy and mystery,” says Drandaki. She added that she is very interested in...

This documentary based on Ghassan Kanafani's novel is an accomplished study of a community dreaming of a lost homeland

A World Not Ours borrows its title from a novel by the author and activist Ghassan Kanafani: it is a filmed portrait of the Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon known as Ein El-Helweh, or "sweet spring". Mahdi Fleifel was born there, and moved away with his family to live in Dubai and Europe – but often returned with his video camera to visit friends and relations and build up this richly personal archive of impressions and interviews. The result is a very watchable study of a stateless community, subsisting on dreams and memories of a lost homeland, and a generation of young men who have no prospects, sometimes drawn to jihadism out of sheer personal frustration; yet they are often quite as critical of the Palestinian leadership as everything else.

A scene from Tawfik Saleh's The Dupes. Egyptian filmmaker Tawfik Saleh died on Sunday, August 18, 2013, aged 87.

Saleh was a pioneer in the school of Arab neo colonial film realism, with many of his films considered classics. He directed seven features between 1955 and 1980.

Saleh co-wrote the screenplay of his first feature, Fool's Alley, with Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Al Ahram notes this week that it "remains one of the most important Egyptian movies in the Fifties."

Despite receiving critical acclaim during the Sixties, Saleh was besieged by president Gamal Abdel Nasser's censors. His 1967 film, The Rebels, was banned outright in Egypt. He left his country in 1970, and spent a decade living in Iraq and Syria.

In 1972, Saleh directed The Dupes. This seminal film was based on the short novel by Palestinian writer and poet Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut.

The Dupes is a landmark of.

Fifty years of movie magic, from Tunisia to Iraq, as chosen by Omar al-Qattan, film-maker and chair of Shubbak – A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture

The Night (Al-Lail)

Mohammad Malas, 1993

A great Syrian film. It is about the director's home town of Quneitra, on the borders of the Golan Heights, which was almost completely destroyed by the Israelis after the 1967 war and remains in ruins. The film is a historical-autobiographical epic of three generations, taking you from the Syrian fight for independence against the French in the 1930s, through the 1948 war with Israel, and into recent times. Malas is probably the most highly regarded living Syrian director – he is still based in Damascus as far as I know – and this film is heavily influenced by Tarkovsky in the use of long, contemplative dream and memory sequences where time is as important an expressive element as space, dialogue or movement.

The...