A portrait of Paul Gautier, a young priest who studied theology in the Dijon seminary in France. In 1957, he decided to go to live in the Holy Land, to live with the people. Based in Nazareth, his conscience opened to the drama of the Palestinian people, and so began a construction project to give back to them what he could.
Ibrahim Khill -- 52' (Palestine/France: 1999)
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 -- 90’, Arabic/English (Palestine/Germany/France/Netherlands/Israel: 2005)
Jackie Salloum -- (United States: 2005)
Ramallah this decade. A free spirited woman dancer, Kamar, finds herself the wife of a prisoner, Zaid, and away from everything she loves until she returns to the dance, defying society's taboos. At the dance Kamar is confronted with Kais, a Palestinian returnee, who has taken Kamar's role as the head choreographer. Sparks fly between Kamar and Kais, creating more than a passionate, emotional dance for the both of them. Matters become even more complicated when Zaid's sentence is extended. At the same time the family's legal case against the land confiscation faces one obstacle after another and the villagers from the nearby villages are unable to reach the family's olive groves, placing the annual harvest and consequently the family's livelihood in danger. And Kamar's life is thrown into turmoil as she becomes increasingly attached to Kais, and caught in the midst of her desire to dance and breaking the family and society taboos of the prisoner's wife's role while life under occupation rages on.
Writer/ Director Najwa Najjar received her BA in Political Science and Economics, and MA in Film and Video production from the US. She has worked in both documentary and fiction since 1999. She has reviewed books for acclaimed journals, and her articles on Palestinian cinema have been published in both local and international newspapers. She lives in Palestine.
Najwa Najjar -- 95’, Arabic/English/Hebrew (Palestine: 2008)
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 mother’s family at risk of eviction if they can’t find proof that the house they have lived in for decades belongs to them. Their predicament is rendered with Aljafari’s usual subtlety, as well as deadpan humor and dark wit. This skeletal narrative provides the scaffolding for a portrait of life in what was once a bustling neighborhood that was nearly emptied by fighting during the establishment of the state of Israel, and then suffered decades of official neglect. In the meantime, Jaffa was often used as a location for action adventure movies featuring the likes of Chuck Norris. While these films used the city as a generically exotic location, they have now become, in a neat bit of irony, the source of documentary images of the city as it was.
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 -- 62’, Arabic/Hebrew with English subtitles (Germany/France/UAE: 2009)
A drama set in the days after the 1929 stock-market crash in Chile, examining the social changes it brought about.
New Yorker Films (1973)
Majdi El-Omari -- fiction, 15' (Canada: 1988)
The film retraces the social life of the residents of Jerusalem, through archival footage and interviews, focusing on the role of al-Hamra Cinema and its demise.
Writer/ Director Najwa Najjar received her BA in Political Science and Economics, and MA in Film and Video production from the US. She has worked in both documentary and fiction since 1999. She has reviewed books for acclaimed journals, and her articles on Palestinian cinema have been published in both local and international newspapers. She lives in Palestine.
Najwa Najjar -- 108' (Palestine: 2002)
Majdi El-Omari -- 26' (Canada: 1990)
