Film Studies: National Cinemas

Also available on YouTube. ARNA'S CHILDREN tells the story of a theatre group that was established by Arna Mer Khamis. Arna comes from a Zionist family and in the 1950s married a Palestinian Arab, Saliba Khamis. On the West Bank, she opened an alternative education system for children whose regular life was disrupted by the Israeli occupation. The theatre group that she started engaged children from Jenin, helping them to express their everyday frustrations, anger, bitterness and fear. Arna's son Juliano, director of this film, was also one of the directors of Jenin's theatre. With his camera, he filmed the children during rehearsal periods from 1989 to 1996. Now, he goes back to see what happened to them.

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.

Living conditions in a refugee camp for Palestinian Arabs in the suburbs of Beirut as seen through the eyes of the children. The film explores themes such as: the experience of exile and Palestinian national identity in the diaspora; the cult of martyrdom; and the role that the media coverage of the current intifada has played in politicizing youth in the camp.

A Palestinian children's dance troupe from a West Bank refugee camp uses performance to express the history, struggle, and aspirations of the Palestinian people in a creative and non-violent way. ...

Farah and Issa are two Palestinian children who live in the refugee camp of Shatila, home to displaced Palestinians and Lebanese alike. Following the Shatila massacre of 1982, Farah and Issa struggle to lead a normal life, as they deal with the realities of living in a refugee camp. ...

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.

Edward Said discusses his postcolonial theory and how it applies to modern culture, from politics to literature. He exposes the Western image of the East as an artificial construct that is still retained today. He discusses Palestine as a politically expedient construct of Europe; argues the right of Palestine to exist as an independent, self-governing nation; and traces the origins of European attitudes toward the Arab world through the literature of E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Chinua Achebe.

"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.

An eccentric French shopkeeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner with spectacular results. Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the Palestinian segregation wall in the West Bank.

5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. Shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, the footage was later turned into a galvanizing cinematic experience by co-directors Burnat and Davidi.

Mays is 22 years old, lives in occupied Palestine and works at the Palestinian Circus School. She is planning a life together with her Swedish boyfriend, Caspar, and she intends to study at the University of Stockholm. However, the road from dream to reality is not easy. Mays is juggling between her family's expectations and Swedish bureaucracy.

The Gaza Strip is home to a million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees whose parents and grandparents went there in 1948 after Israel moved in. In this program, we meet Reyidh and Sabah, members of one refugee family trying to cope. This program also examines why the United Nations fails to criticize Israel's aggression and denies Palestinian statehood.

Documenting the Art Installation “Going for a Ride?” made by the Palestinian Artist Vera Tamari. The installation is a statement on the aggressive and deliberate crushing of hundreds of privately-owned cars by Israeli tanks in Ramallah and El-Bireh during the military incursions in the two towns in 2002. It focuses on crushed cars because of the powerful meaning cars usually carry: freedom, the open road, travel and movement. In the film, the cars are brought to life again by searching into the memories of those who rode them.

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)

In this meditation on how cinema records history, the filmmakers, members of the "Dziga Vertov Group," contrast a French family's life with an impressionistic portrait of war in Palestine, as reflected through television, books, and other media.

Jenin Jenin, directed and co-produced by Palestinian actor and director Mohammed Bakri, includes testimony from Jenin residents after the Israeli army's Defensive Wall operation, during which the city and camp were the scenes of fierce fighting.

In this short art piece, we see ordinary men and women placing plastic bags over their feet, pulling their clothing up to their knees, clutching their children to their chests, and setting off down a 110 metre tunnel of sewage. Jarrar’s short is shot in one of the few “routes” through which Palestinians try to enter Jerusalem from parts of the West Bank. Shot during the month of Ramadan in a sewage culvert beneath Beit Hanina (a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem divided by walls and checkpoints), Journey 110 is visually haunted by half invisible bodies wading through fetid darkness to reach a distant light at its end.

Set in a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem, Lesh Sabreen? tells the story of two young lovers as they navigate dreams and dead-ends in their socially-conservative and Israeli-controlled community. The film illustrates the several layers of authority, from the patriarchal social norms and taboos, to economic pressures and the military occupation, continually facing young Arab Jerusalemites. Sabreen and Ayman dream of being together. But without true economic opportunities, Ayman will never be able to care for Sabreen in a way that her father would approve. And with the power structures conspiring to restrain their dreams, will the young lovers muster the imagination to realize their hopes for the future?

A short film about a group of independent Palestinian filmmakers trying to make a film in the Occupied Territories. They encounter the resistance of the Israeli military authorities and their film project is stopped. Filmed entirely on location in Palestine, December 2001.

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.

Combining news soundbytes, movie clips and documentary footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the filmmakers critique Western-based representations of Arab culture. The artists cleverly mimic the Western media tableau in an exhilarating mix of fragmented stereotypes from mainstream movies to prime-time news.

A documentary that follows a day in the lives of a group of friends in East Jerusalem. Abu Daoud shares his grief and grievance with his friends. His son is due to appear in Israeli Military Court the following day. Although they come from varying walks of life, these friends share a deep-seated daily struggle against Israel's occupation.

In 1990, an international team provided training and a video camera for three young Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For six months, they filmed their own lives

Available on Vimeo. The history of the town of Jaffa, a thriving port city now part of Tel Aviv, provides the background for Aljafari's most recent film, centering on his mothers family at risk of eviction if they cant find proof that the house they have lived in for decades belongs to them.

Famed writer and critic Susan Sontag's sole documentary project, shot in Israel on the fly in the final days and immediate aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Not only does the film scrutinize the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, it also brilliantly underscores the deepening divisions within the Jewish thought over the very question of Palestinian sovereignty. Banned by Israeli authorities upon its initial release, it's a visually visceral portrait of a land torn apart.

We travel in this documentary between Bethlehem, Haifa and Nazareth to explore the life of Karimeh Abbud - the first female photographer in pre-1948 Palestine. Born in Bethlehem in 1894, Karimeh rapidly rose to prominence in a traditionally male-dominated profession after receiving her first camera as a teenager. Her photos are important historical records of life in Palestine in the early 1900s.

This deceptively quiet film presents a portrait of Aljafari's family in Ramleh and Jaffa that hovers between documentary and cinematic memoir, guided by a nimble camera moving calmly but ceaselessly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined. The title refers to the roof missing from the house where Aljafari's family resettled in 1948, a home unfinished, an incomplete construction project.

In the summer of 2002, Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi and Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan embarked on a cinematographic journey through their country, Palestine-Israel.For this trip they traced a route on a road map. They called it "Route 181", after resolution 181 adopted by the UN in 1947. This resolution divided Palestine into two states, 56% of land for the Jewish minority, 43% for the Arab majority, and the rest, an international zone. This theoretical line presented as a solution caused the first Arab-Israeli war, which is yet to end. This journey along Route 181 followed this border, that has never existed.

Samia, 71, is still feisty, active and committed. She takes us on a journey in Jerusalem and Jericho as she travels the path of a life marked by her struggle for the right of girls to education and the right of Palestinians to live in Jerusalem. Samia has lived wars, Intifadas and times of unrest and has negotiated power with members of her society and with the Israeli occupation. Yet, she has a place in her heart for the tender memories of love.

Slingshot Hip Hop braids together the stories of young Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and inside Israel as they discover Hip Hop and employ it as a tool to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty. From internal checkpoints and Separation Walls to gender norms and generational differences, this is the story of young people crossing the borders that separate them.

Soup Over Bethlehem (2006) depicts an ordinary Palestinian family, Sansour's own, around a dinner table on a rooftop overlooking the West Bank city of Bethlehem. What starts as a culinary discussion about the national dish mloukhieh being served from a soup bowl soon evolves into a personal and engaging conversation about politics -- thereby emphasizing the symbiosis of food and politics so indicative of the Palestinian experience.

"Salvaged from the ruins of Beirut after 1982, Abu Ali's early film has only recently been made available. Shooting under extraordinary conditions, the director, who worked with Godard on his Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), and founded the PLO's film division, covers conditions in Lebanon's refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. They Do Not Exist is a stylistically unique work which demonstrates the intersection between the political and the aesthetic."

Simone Britton etches a haunting portrait of one of the most profound geographical markers of our time -- the wall of separation constructed by Israel that shields it from adjacent, conflicted Palestinian territories. This documentary shows how the Wall is destroying one of the most historically significant landscapes in the world, while imprisoning one people and enclosing the other.