"The central street of the city of Ramallah in the Occupied Territories is alive 24 hours a day. Its rich and colorful human landscape encapsulate the socio-political state of the Palestinian people--their anger, sorrow, joys and the banalities of daily life, in the midst of their struggle for independence." -Suha Arraf
Suha Arraf was born in 1969 in the village of Mi’ilya to a Palestinian family. She obtained her BA degree in Philosophy and Literature at Haifa University (1990) and her Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Tel Aviv (1994).
Suha Arraf -- Documentary, 6' (Palestine: 2003)
Rana, a young Palestinian woman sneaks out of her father's house at daybreak. It is the day she is set to go with her father to Egypt, but she doesn't want to leave. She wants to stay in Jerusalem with her boyfriend and does not want to marry any of the men her father has selected. She wanders through East Jerusalem and Ramallah, looking for her true love, Khalil. Upon finding him she tries to organize the wedding and convince her father to give his consent. For this is in her view the only way to remain here. While the people of East Jerusalem and Ramallah are living under oppression and occupation, while abnormal things like roadblocks and barriers, soldiers and guns are becoming the reality of everyday life, normal things like love or a wedding become fiction.
Born in Nazareth in 1961, Abu-Assad studied and worked as an airplane engineer in The Netherlands for several years, before entering the world of cinema and television as a producer.
Hany Abu-Assad -- 87’, Arabic with English Subtitles (Palestine: 2002)
At the time of filming, there were 274 Israeli checkpoints in autonomous Palestinian areas. Crossing them provides a real difficulty for thousands of Palestinians, young and old, who are separated -- one village from another, one neighborhood from another. The explores the effect of these checkpoints on the daily lives of five individuals.
Hanna Elias -- 30' (Palestine/USA: 2002)
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. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari’s striking use of his “cast,” his family, reveals the influence of Bresson’s use of nonprofessional actors as models whose performances emanate from their presence, not from acting.
Kamal Aljafari is an internationally recognized filmmaker whose work searches for home while also questioning the boundaries between “documentary” and “fiction.” Blending a potent mix of personal ethics, transnational politics, and video and film aesthetics, Aljafari reinvents the long take, the slow tracking shot through space, and widescreen mise-en scene-once keynotes of European art cinema-in films where time and place take precedence over story and character. Aljafari’s films represent a new kind of domestic ethnography-“home movies” in which his family members come to represent all who wait, survivors of a decimated nation, forever looking for what has vanished, confined to an ever eroding domestic orbit, in a war with no end in sight.
Kamal Aljafari -- 61’, Arabic/Hebrew with English Subtitles (Germany: 2006)
Walls continue to be raised, barbed-wires laid down, new borders succeeding those already present in the collective unconscious of both peoples. What can cinema do before a situation so desperately devoid of hope? Sivan and Khleifi, faced with the tragic torments shaking their societies, come together in a sort of filmic act of faith. They believe that the only "realistic" solution rests in the prospect of a binational state where citizens share equal rights and duties for peaceful coexistence.
Michel Khleifi was born in Nazareth in 1950. In 1970 he traveled to Belgium where he studied television and theatre directing. Considered the founder of modern Palestinian cinema, Khleifi produced and directed several full-length features and documentaries for international release and broadcast. His previous documentary feature, Fertile Memory (1980), was the first Palestinian film to be shown at the Cannes FF and was a groundbreaking work, both on a political and aesthetic level, treating the struggle for women's freedom and emancipation, across the generations and under occupation, in a haunting lyrical style that became all his own.
Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan -- Documentary, 270’ (Germany/France: 2003)
