Film Screenings / Programs / Series
CINEMA OF PALESTINIAN RETURN
May 3 – May 18
May 3-18, 2024
The experiences of Palestine and Palestinians, of dispossession, erasure, and annihilation, have their counterparts in steadfastness, insistence, and resistance. These forces crystallize in the unrelenting Palestinian political demand for a return to their lands. While threatening to upend a world imperial system and its constellation of Zionist settlement, the structures of this return are in fact highly practical: systems of organization, refusal, and care; networks of ideology and commitment; and a determination to think beyond the confines of current political possibility, to envision a Palestine at once restored and remade.
This spring, Anthology presents the series, “Cinema of Palestinian Return,” which traces the project of a collective cinema, showcasing a number of early fiction films spanning the primary geographies of Palestinian exile. This represents a deliberate formal choice: Palestinian filmmaking in the days of revolution was often determined by the political demands and material limitations of the period, which left early filmmakers constrained by the documentary mode. Reflecting on these tendencies, Jean-Luc Godard noted that after the nakba of 1947-49, “the Jews became the stuff of fiction, the Palestinians, of documentary,” which indeed bespoke the emphasis on testimony and the chronicling of events in the work of militant Palestinian cinema.
Nevertheless, revolutionary Palestinian filmmakers and their comrades from across the Arab world made rare and valiant contributions to narrative cinema beginning in the 1970s. Some directors adapted novels to narrate Palestine; others devised scenarios based on their personal and filial involvement fighting for the cause; while some creatively experimented with found footage to recreate and recollect places made inaccessible by Zionist encroachment. Although film sets and their attendant possibilities of cinematic form in historic Palestine remained largely foreclosed until the late 1980s, several efforts at feature filmmaking were taken up by politically-committed directors in neighboring nations and locales. Among them, Borhane Alaouié’s KAFR QASIM (1975), which staged southern Syria as occupied Palestine to portray the lead-up to the eponymous 1956 massacre; Kassem Hawal’s RETURN TO HAIFA (1982), in which Palestinians from the Nahr al-Barid and Badawi refugee camps re-enacted the forced displacement of 1948 using the Lebanese port of Tripoli as their stand-in; and Khaled Hamada’s THE KNIFE (1972), which, while filmed in Syria, was scripted from Ghassan Kanafani’s “All That’s Left To You” (1966), a novella set in Gaza.
The structure of the screenings will parallel these trajectories and histories, with each afternoon or evening representing a specific geography of Palestinian life, to be accompanied by panels or teach-ins. The result is a survey of some of Arab cinema’s pioneers, including Qais al-Zubaidi (Iraq, Syria), Mohammad Malas (Syria), Christian Ghazi (Lebanon), Mustafa Abu Ali and Vladimir Tamari (Palestine), and Yousry Nasrallah (Egypt). The diversity of the works testifies to the desire to transcend documentary tactics, towards an ambitious, imaginative, and politically subversive project of narrative fiction.
The month of May marks the 76th year of the nakba, a commemoration soaked in the blood of Gaza, whose people have faced relentless massacre and dispossession by Western and Zionist forces. Preserving, circulating, and politically engaging with the cultural production of the Palestinian struggle is a minimum demand. The films that emerged from this struggle are tethered to the dreams of the Palestinian people, who despite setback and catastrophe continue to assert their right to return to their homeland.
“Cinema of Palestinian Return” is guest-programmed by Kaleem Hawa and Nadine Fattaleh, who wrote the introduction above.
Special thanks to Naja Al Achkar (Nadi Lekol Nas); Daoud Alaouié; Kamal Aljafari; Sébastien Fouque (Pyramide International); Khadijah Habashneh; Zeina Hanna; Kassem Hawal; Flavia Mazzarino; Irit Neidhardt (mec film); Palestine Film Institute; the Tamari family; and Mohanad Yaqubi.
LEBANON
Christian Ghazi
A HUNDRED FACES FOR A SINGLE DAY / MI’AT WAJEH LI YAWM WAHED
1972, 64 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“Made in 1969 and released in 1972, Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece is one of the filmmaker’s only two surviving early works. Through this fiction-documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a stinging critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s pre-civil war period. An essay on labor, class, social relations, and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his ‘manifesto on cinema,’ a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage, and an embedded perspective on direct action.” –ARTEEAST
Fri, May 3 at 7:30 and Thurs, May 9 at 9:00. The screening on Fri, May 3 will be introduced by Kaleem Hawa & Nour Annan, and will be followed by a panel discussion between Kaleem Hawa, Nadine Fattaleh, and Nour Annan. The screening on Thurs, May 9 will be introduced by Lylla Younes, and will be followed by a panel discussion between Younes, Layla Tabbal, and Haya Ghandour.
SYRIA
Qais al-Zubaidi
THE VISIT / AL-ZIYARAH
1972, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“THE VISIT sublimates narrative and visual conventions into a diaphanous haze of lyrical evocation. Linearity is here dissolved not through anti-narrative deconstruction but through a refutation of its alleged logical primacy.” –Celluloid Liberation Front, THE BROOKLYN RAIL
Mohammad Malas
THE NIGHT / AL-LEIL
1992, 116 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“In THE NIGHT, Malas returns to the Syria of the late 1930s and ’40s to reclaim not only his own childhood as the son of a deeply troubled father, but also his country’s struggles with colonial rule and with Zionist settlements in neighboring Palestine. Malas’s alter ego is a young boy who lives with his parents in Quneitra, a rural village in the Golan Heights, not far from the Palestinian border, which was later annexed [and occupied] by the [Zionists]. Dense with historical references and haunting images, THE NIGHT offers an all-too-rare glimpse into daily life in the [Arab] world – and into one man’s efforts to understand both father and fatherland.” –SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Sat, May 4 at 5:00 and Mon, May 13 at 7:30. Both screenings will be introduced by Basil Alsubee.
GAZA
Mustafa Abu Ali
SCENES OF THE OCCUPATION FROM GAZA / MASHAHID MIN AL-IHTILAL FI GHAZA
1973, 13 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. [It] employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. It was the only such project produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.” –PALESTINE FILM INSTITUTE
Khaled Hamada
THE KNIFE / AL-SIKKIN
1972, 87 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“Ghassan Kanafani’s novella ‘All That’s Left to You’ (1966) is perhaps one of the most significant Palestinian texts, navigating an abstract symbology of collaboration, violation, and resistance in Gaza. Its adaptation, THE KNIFE, is a largely-unseen and necessarily contingent film. Produced under the auspices of the Syrian General Cinema Organization (GCO), just as Tewfiq Saleh’s THE DUPES (1973), it too changes the end of its originating Kanafani text, in this case flattening it. What results then is a morass of Arab reaction, at once ghostly beach pastoral and nightmarish bedroom narrative, unfinished and elliptical.” –Kaleem Hawa
Sat, May 4 at 8:00. Intro and Q&A with Mayss Al Alami.
OCCUPIED PALESTINE, PROGRAM 1
Vladimir Tamari
AL QUDS
1968, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English.
“A short film made by Vladimir Tamari following the first anniversary of the occupation of Arab Jerusalem by the Zionist army at the start of the 1967 war. Using footage from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) cinema archives where he worked as a technician, Tamari edited this film and organized its narration and addition of music by his friends, all volunteers and amateurs as he was, in order to express the feelings of the Palestinians at the loss of their capital city and center of their spiritual, commercial, and intellectual life.” –PALESTINE FILMS
Kamal Aljafari
RECOLLECTION
2015, 70 min, DCP. In English.
“RECOLLECTION was inspired by a late-night TV encounter in a London hotel room. While flipping channels, Kamal Aljafari stumbled upon Menahem Golan’s THE DELTA FORCE (1986), about an elite counter-terrorism team rescuing hostages from kaffiyeh-clad terrorists in a Beirut played onscreen by Jaffa. As Chuck Norris sped through the streets, Aljafari noticed, in the background, someone he recognized from his youth. In his film, Aljafari collates images shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the ’90s, such as the bourekas films that often reinforced Zionist origin narratives and hero mythologies in their scenes of slapstick action, car chases, shootouts, and Arab-coded Mizrahi ‘thugs’ threatening Ashkenazi maidens. He then enacts what he describes as ‘cinematic justice,’ using digital software to erase the leading actors, and leaving only those figures who appear in the background.” –Kaleem Hawa, CINEMA SCOPE
Sun, May 5 at 5:30 and Tues, May 14 at 6:30. Both screenings will be introduced by Nadine Fattaleh.
OCCUPIED PALESTINE, PROGRAM 2
Kassem Hawal
RETURN TO HAIFA / A’ID ILA HAYFA
1982, 75 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“The first feature-length Palestinian fictional film, RETURN TO HAIFA adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella by the same name. Filmed in Lebanon during its crushing civil war, the film team relied on the communities of Palestinian life-in-exile and the infrastructures of the Palestinian resistance for its production; per Hawal’s screen notes, resistance fighters went door to door in Badawi and Nahr al-Barid refugee camps to furnish the actors for the scenes of mass exodus filmed in Tripoli. What results is a national initiative, at once polemical and cautious, of exodus and its attendant psychologies.” –Kaleem Hawa
Sun, May 5 at 8:00 and Thurs, May 9 at 7:00. Both screenings will be introduced by Kaleem Hawa. The screening on Thurs, May 9 will be followed by a discussion with Kaleem Hawa, Nadine Fattaleh, and Adam HajYahia.
OCCUPIED PALESTINE, PROGRAM 3
Borhane Alaouié
KAFR QASIM
1975, 108 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“The Lebanese master Borhane Alaouié’s first feature film, KAFR QASIM recreates a day in the life of the eponymous village, made site of a 1956 Zionist massacre. Based on a novelization by ĘżAsim al-Jundi, the film’s narrative threads remain unresolved, a tale of forty-nine lives cut short by a tightening project of settlement. Filmed in the Syrian village of al-Shaykh Saad, the film suggests entangled Arab fates, producing a coldly realist depiction of the nature of Zionist occupation and the functioning of power, labor, and capital in historic Palestine.” –Kaleem Hawa
Mon, May 6 at 7:30 and Tues, May 14 at 8:45. Both screenings will be introduced by Hicham Awad.
EGYPT
Yousry Nasrallah
THE GATE OF THE SUN / BAB EL SHAMS
2004, 278 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. U.S. premiere of brand-new restoration!
“A four-hour epic, THE GATE OF THE SUN is Yousry Nasrallah’s powerful adaptation of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s novel of fifty years of Palestinian dispossession, exile, and resistance. The film follows the flight of Younes, his wife Nahila, and those around them, from their village in northern Palestine to a refugee camp in Lebanon. Some vow to continue the struggle, most simply struggle to survive. Unsparingly detailing the impact of the nakba on Palestinian life and society, and the refugees’ relationship with the Lebanese people, THE GATE OF THE SUN spans generations, mixing personal stories with historical events.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Tues, May 7 at 6:00 and Sat, May 18 at 5:00. The screening on Tues, May 7 will be introduced by Alia Ayman. The screening on Sat, May 18 will be introduced by Kaleem Hawa.
