Film Studies: National Cinemas

They not only save the village, but the Barrier is pushed back behind the Green Line into No Man's Land. In the process, Ayed and Iltezam unleash an inspiring, yet little-known, movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that is still gaining ground today. In an action-filled documentary featuring archival footage of this movement from its infancy, Budrus will inspire and challenge audiences worldwide.

"Created by a Palestinian, Israeli, North and South American team, Encounter Point ... tell[s] the story of an Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother ... at the vanguard of a movement to push Palestinian and Israeli societies to ... a new consensus for nonviolence and peace"--Container.

'At eight o'clock, it's Laila's birthday, okay?' Palestinian judge turned cab driver Abu's wife reminds her husband. On his young daughter's birthday, Abu faces a nerve-wracking shift in a Ramallah yellow cab, armed only with an ex-jurist's misplaced pride, a father's loyalty, and a sticker reminding passengers that smoking and carrying AK-47's are prohibited.

Due to come out on DVD, this film is currently only available by subscription to Fandor. Writer/director Rashid Masharawi's inspired hybrid of documentary and fiction begins in a refugee camp near Ramallah. Jabir runs a mobile cinema from his old truck throughout the West Bank while his wife works to bring emergency medical care to Palestinians. Both navigate endless checkpoints and other obstacles by looking for creative solutions. When Jabir is invited by a spirited schoolteacher to make an open-air screening in the old city of Jerusalem, he becomes obsessed with the idea of this pilgrimage and begins to investigate the possibilities.

Two men and a boy try to be smuggled into Kuwait to find work and escape the poverty and apathy of the Palestinian refugee camps.

Kalandia is the checkpoint that the director and his wife must cross every time they go to Jerusalem, experiencing the humiliations and the violence of segregation. In contrast with the horror of this daily bullying, the surrounding destruction and the ordinary suffering, Sobhi Al-Zobaidi conveys, in a very personal way, people’s capacity to go on living.

A docudrama about a Palestinian filmmaker who is commissioned by an American organization to make a documentary film depicting Jerusalem as a city of peace and coexistence between Jews and Arabs. While making the film, the filmmaker keeps running into situations that are very different from what he is trying to depict. The reality of things on the ground proves to be much stronger than its representation, and it reaches a point where the filmmaker decides that he is unable to finish the film. (Also on Vimeo)

A group of friends from Gaza are trapped in Ramallah without possibilities to visit their hometown, they miss their family, friends and even the stones from Gaza.