January 22-26

FILM SCREENING: MUSSOLINI'S SISTER BY JUNA SULEIMAN + TROUBLE IN PARADISE AND MOONSCAPE BY MONA BENYAMIN

January 26

LIVE PANEL WITH FILMMAKERS JUNA SULEIMAN AND MONA BENYAMIN, MODERATED BY DR. NADIA YAQUB

Please view the special live conversation at this link.

From January 22 to 26, join us for a five-day screening of films by Palestinian directors Juna Suleiman and Mona Benyamin. In collaboration with LIFTA Volumes, we will kick off the semester-long program ‘Palestine, IN-BETWEEN’ with Suleiman’s feature-length documentary Mussolini’s Sister and Benyamin’s short films Trouble in Paradise and Moonscape. On January 26, the screening period will round out with a live panel and Q&A held between the directors and moderator Dr. Nadia Yaqub, author of Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. Topics in the panel will be guided by themes present in both of their works: interpersonal relationships and generational differences within Palestinian society. Through their films, Mona and Juna—who themselves belong to two different generations of Palestinian filmmakers—examine their relationships with the older Palestinian generation who happen to be those closest to them. Benyamin’s films’ main characters are her parents, while Juna brings her grandmother to the big screen. A step away from the scripts and storylines commonly associated with mainstream Palestinian cinema, they mock and analyze the perspectives and mentalities of the leading characters in their films through a distinct lens. Mussolini’s Sister gives entrance to the everyday life of Suleiman’s grandmother, Hiam, a cynical and strong-willed survivor of the Nakbeh who cannot seem to let go of control even in her late age. Benyamin’s shorts experiment with her amusing parents as she places them in a sci-fi world full of distortion and dark humor.

About Juna Suleiman

Juna Suleiman (b. 1981, Nazareth) is a Palestinian filmmaker. She graduated from the Tel Aviv University School of Film and Television in 2006. Suleiman directed, filmed, produced, and co-edited her first feature-documentary, Mussolini’s Sister; its world premiere was at the IDFA Competition for First Appearance 2018. The film has won Best Debut Film and Best Cinematography at Docaviv International Film Festival 2019 in Israel. It continues to screen and compete in festivals across Europe and worldwide. Suleiman was also the casting director of notable feature films, including The Time that Remains and It Must be Heaven by Elia Suleiman, Omar by Hany Abu-Assad, and Let It Be Morning by Eran Kolirin—where she also appeared as an actress in a supporting role. Suleiman is a former fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

About Mona Benyamin  

Mona Benyamin (b.1997, Haifa) is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker. Benyamin obtained her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 2020. Her work explores intergenerational outlooks on hope and trauma, simultaneously questioning identity by using humor and irony as political tools of resistance and reflection. Her practice consists of time-based media, in addition to painting and drawing. She typically works with her immediate surroundings, often casting her family as the main protagonists in her films and using their home as the only setting.

About Nadia Yaqub

Nadia Yaqub is a professor of Arab cultures in the Department of Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018) and Pens, Swords and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee (Brill, 2006), co-editor with Rula Quawas of Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017) as well as numerous articles and book chapters about Arab and Palestinian film and literature. She curated Gaza on Screen, a three-day film festival that showcased films and filmmakers from Gaza, presented by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University in April 2019.

Moonscape

17 min / Palestine / Arabic with English subtitles

Moonscape is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle of the road song, performed as a duet between a male and female singer, in Arabic. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons, and makes a connection between his story and that of the director's – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible. The visuals of the film are a hybrid of surrealist scenes from the Arab music industry, reenacted by the artist’s parents who also play the roles of the singers in the film, and film noir; in addition to found footage from the NASA archives, references from canonic films that influenced the art world and show representations of the Moon, and screenshots of Email correspondences with staff members of the Lunar Embassy. All in order to explore the relationship between hope, nostalgia and despair.

*A moonscape is an area or vista of the lunar landscape (generally of the Earth's moon), or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term "moonscape" is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war, often by shelling.

Trouble in Paradise

8:30 minutes / Palestine / English with Arabic subtitles 

Trouble in Paradise is a dysfunctional sitcom set out to explore humor as a mechanism of coping with trauma, pain, and taboos in relation to the Nakba and the Israeli occupation; by posing three sets of jokes ranging from the classical misogynistic genre to anti-humor and culturally specific humor; In order to examine why Nakba jokes never fully evolved as a genre and entered the Palestinian mainstream. 

*The main protagonists of the film are the director’s parents who do not speak English and have gone through the Nakba and the Naksa and never shared their memories from these major events.

Mussolini’s Sister

70 Min / Israel, Palestine / Arabic with English subtitles 

Despite the everyday banality of growing old, Hiam Jarjoura (85), an amusingly cynical lady from Nazareth- who has every reason to despise the world as experienced today- manages to rule over her entire world from a single old phonebook, a cctv and a daily meal she cooks for her beloved son, Mubada (55).  Gradually and painfully, Hiam finds herself with more time to kill and a lot more to recall. The film offers a retreat into Hiam's discerning memory, as she consciously finds herself more and more alone, at the presence of strangers, and final reflections on love, politics and contempt.