Christmas 2001, the director travels to Washington to visit his brother and his family. Far from the intifada, they live in the frustration of exile, and ask questions about the meaning of their identity.
Saed Andoni was born in Bethlehem in 1972. For seven years, he worked as film editor for documentaries. In 2001 he gained an M.A. degree in documentary filmmaking from Goldsmith's College in London.
Saed Andoni -- 32' (Palestine: 2002)
Born in 1942 in Palmilla, Chile to Palestinian parents, is a major Latin American director and screenwriter. Littin has had a long and distinguished career as a filmmaker and screenwriter in his home county and in Europe.
Miguel Littin -- 110’, Spanish (Mexico: 1976)
Since 1967, thousands of Palestinians have been incarcerated in Israeli prisons. After the Oslo accords, some were released. These women and men had a difficult time readapting after years of reclusion. Four men and four women share their difficulties with integration into a new life, their traumas and the tensions that exist in their families within a new Palestinian society.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi is an independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar. He studied economics at Birzeit University and Cinema at NYU.
Subhi al-Zobaidi -- 47’ (Palestine: 2001)
In a landscape now interrupted by military checkpoints, a group of Palestinian filmmakers attempt to reach Jerusalem. When they decide to avoid a closed checkpoint by taking an unused side road, the landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. “like twenty impossibles” is both a visual poem and a narrative, questioning the space between fiction and reality, and the politics of art and resistance.
Annemarie Jacir has been working in independent film since 1994 and has written, directed and produced a number of films including A Post Oslo History (1998), The Satellite Shooters (2001) and Like Twenty Impossibles (2003). She has taught courses at Columbia, Bethlehem, and Birzeit University. She also works as a freelance editor and cinematographer. Salt of this Sea (2008) is her first feature film, and her second work to debut at Cannes Film Festival. Having been banned from returning to Palestine, she now lives in Amman, Jordan.
Annemarie Jacir -- 17’ (Palestine/USA: 2003)
A documentary exploring the phenomenon of child labour in Gaza. The film tells the moving stories of four children, looking into the economic, social and political conditions that led them into the workforce at a young age, and examining the impact and implications for their families, the society and their future.
Abdel Salam Shehadeh is from Rafah in Gaza, Palestine. He has worked in television production and media and as a camera and sound technician, and has worked in various capacities for international news crews. Director of more than 15 Documentary films such as The Shadow, the Cane, and Debris which had a good impact in many international festivals.
Abdel Salam Shehadeh -- Documentary, 26' (Palestine: 1996)
In January 2009, while Israel is bombarding Gaza, Rashid Masharawi is in Baghdad making a film on young children forced to work in post-war Iraq. Contrasting their lives with those of similarly burdened Gazan children, the film presents a world in which everyone, no matter how young, has to struggle to survive. As a Palestinian and Gazan, with extensive personal experience of life in refugee camps, Masharawi's deep sense of identification with the children's traumas makes for a deeply affecting and authoritative document of local situation.
Rashid Masharawi was born and raised in Shati refugee camp, Gaza Strip. He is a self-taught filmmaker, beginning to work at eighteen in the cinema industry and acquiring skills on over twenty films before starting himself to write and direct his own. Masharawi’s films portray his knowledge of living under the Israeli Occupation in refugee camps, the new space of the intifada, as well as his constant reflection on cinema narrative.
Rashid Masharawi -- Documentary, 52’, Arabic (Qatar/Tunisia: 2009)
The three filmmakers, who work as TV news cameramen in Ramallah, are caught in their offices when the Israeli military occupies the city in March 2002. This film is a chronicle of the days they spent inside, under curfew, as the siege of Arafat’s compound dragged on. Its follows the mundane realities of trying to live under a military curfew with humor and dignity, and ends with their escape from the office.
Imad Ahmed, Ismail Habash & Raed Al Helou -- Documentary, 52’ (Palestine: 2002)
A Palestinian filmmaker is commissioned by an American organization to make a documentary film, which is to depict Jerusalem as a city of peace and coexistence between Jews and Arabs. But and 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.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi is an independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar. He studied economics at Birzeit University and Cinema at NYU.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi -- 29’, Arabic with English Subtitles (Palestine: 2001)
