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Analysis: Film Festival in Israel Focuses Mainly on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Morning Edition: March 16, 2004
Mideast Film Festival
BOB EDWARDS, host:
A Palestinian film festival titled Dreams of a Nation screened this past week in five cities in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The rare assemblage of work drew Palestinian filmmakers and movie fans into discussion about the direction of an industry that has been devoted almost exclusively to the theme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. NPR's Julie McCarthy attended the festival and has this report.
SOUNDBITE OF PEOPLE TALKING; MUSIC
JULIE McCARTHY reporting:
Young musicians from the Palestinian Conservatory launched the opening of the festival in East Jerusalem, showcasing the talents of the older generation of Palestinian filmmakers. Mustafa Abu Ali's 1974 work "They Don't Exist" is one of the earliest Palestinian documentaries and takes its title from a remark credited to Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969. She was quoted in a Sunday Times of London interview saying, "It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They didn't exist."
SOUNDBITE OF FILM
McCARTHY: Filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali says the film is a refutation of Golda Meir's reported remark. It depicts the 1974 Israeli
Palestinian refugee camp in Nabatiya, South Lebanon.
SOUNDBITE OF FILM
Mr. MUSTAFA ABU ALI (Filmmaker): It was badly bombarded by aircraft, and at the same time they were saying that we do not exist, huh? So what the hell they were bombarding at that point? Were they bombarding ghosts or Palestinians, huh? So we existed at least as targets, huh?
McCARTHY: Golda Meir said later she'd been misquoted and what she actually said was that there is no Palestine people; there are Palestinian refugees. Nonetheless, the contemporary parallels of this 30-year-old film intrigued the audience. In one scene, a refugee mother calls her slain son a martyr. In another, a Palestinian official tells reporters the Americans are to blame for arming Israel. One audience member asks the film director whether he thought he could make the same documentary today, but simply change the name of the camp. He says yes. But director Abu Ali says the new generation of filmmakers may have greater motivation to express the current Palestinian condition.
Mr. ALI: Because most of them maybe went through the experience of throwing stones and ...(unintelligible), huh? And I think they are much more involved than the older generation, huh?
McCARTHY: New aspiring filmmakers continue to draw on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for material.
SOUNDBITE OF "COMING BACK"
McCARTHY: Twenty-eight-year-old Ahmed Habash brings the enduring battle to the screen in a totally new way.
SOUNDBITE OF "COMING BACK"
McCARTHY: His seven-minute animation titled "Coming Back" features a lone bird stumbling upon ruins. It is the Jenin refugee camp, largely destroyed in Israel's incursion into the West Bank in 2002. The bird has returned home, but doesn't recognize it. Pecking through the wreckage, the bird plucks at belongings, toys and eventually...
SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION
McCARTHY: ...a land mine. Two other full-length documentaries, "Jenin, Jenin" and "Invasion," treat the same subject, but filmmaker Ghada Tirowi favored the animated film because she said in addition to being poignant, it had humor.
Ms. GHADA TIROWI (Filmmaker): Here we live in a disaster, yes, but we have some fun moments. We have some funny people. We have some humor. We're not crying all the time. It's true. It's not reality when you have people crying all the time. It's not true.
McCARTHY: A documentary about discrimination against veiled Muslim women in the US was another crowd pleaser. Seventeen-year-old Risan Isa(ph) said the film "Transparency" was required viewing because it showed the way the West feels about veils.
RISAN ISA: (Through Translator) Bringing an idea like this in a film is good, especially after the 11th of September, when Islam is talked about in negative terms.
SOUNDBITE OF PEOPLE TALKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE
McCARTHY: A panel of filmmakers debated how to get funding for their films and where to screen them. "Invasion" director Nizar Hassan said Palestinian films are not being seen by the Palestinian people and championed screening in refugee camps. All agreed on the need to renovate the few defunct theaters of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Panelists also agreed that as the defining feature of life, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would continue to dominate their filmmaking.
At least one feature film shown, "The Olive Harvest, " departs from the theme, but the conflict is at the core of the most of the 36 works that were screened. Director Najawa Najjar says it could not be otherwise.
Ms. NAJAWA NAJJAR (Director): It comes with being Palestinian. We haven't had a state. We--our land is being stolen from us and all of this is the search.
McCARTHY: The search, too, is for a film that Palestinian audiences would find satisfying and that could also be a box office hit abroad.
Julie McCarthy, NPR News.
CREDITS
EDWARDS: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Bob Edwards.
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