London Palestine Film Festival 2014

The London Palestine Film Festival 2014 opens on Friday November 28.  Here's brief history of the festival from the sites, "about" page:

The first London Palestine Film Festival was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in Spring 1999. In response to public interest, the organisers decided in 2004 to establish the Palestine Film Foundation (PFF) as a body dedicated to the coordination of the festival and to the archiving of audiovisual materials related to Palestine.

The PFF is a nonprofit initiative which seeks to develop an audience for and to encourage the development of a Palestinian cinema and cinema related to Palestine. It is managed by a network of academics, curators, filmmakers, and volunteers from Palestine, the UK and elsewhere.

In addition to the annual festival, the PFF coordinates film and video related tours, special screenings and film linked seminars throughout the year and across the UK. These activities allow the PFF to introduce innovative and important works of documentary and fiction to new audiences and to provide a forum for visiting artists to engage UK audiences with work that is otherwise seldom screened.

From 2012, the PFF began developing a new web portal designed to increase access to its expansive archive of film and video related resources. Funding is currently being sought for this new online platform for research, exhibition, and distribution, with the site expected to launch in summer 2013.

The PFF relies on charitable donations, partnerships, and funding to deliver its projects. Please consider making a secure donation to the PFF using the button at the left of this page.

And details of the current year's festival are here.

Posters from the Palestinian Revolution

I'm going to blog some of the posters and maybe some other things I saw at the RichMix venue in London's Bethnal Green Road tonight at the exhibition, The World is With Us, Global Film and Poster Art from the Palestinian Revolution, 1968 - 1980.

But first up I must say what a tremendous success the evening was.  The RichMix has various levels and the reception, you know, drinks and nibbles was on the ground floor and the exhibition was downstairs in the basement.  Karma Nabulsi opened the proceedings by explaining what the exhibition was all about and she made the now customary reference to Palestine Film Foundation director, Nick Denes, who has worked very hard to bring the whole thing together.

The exhibition consisted of several old televisions positioned around the room on tables and posters adorning the walls.  The age of each TV was matched to the age of the film it was showing and there were headphones wired to each TV so each one could be focused on individually.  I didn't actually pick up a program for the event so I can't say what any of the films were. Some were colour and some were black and white.  There was also an old radio and an old reel to reel tape player to show the kind of technology that was available to our revolutionary heroes during the period under view.

Anyway, here are some of the pics I took and tweeted in the order that I took them:

That's simply the view from the ground floor down to the basement and here's what you see as you land:

But the downstairs wasn't open yet so that was a sneak preview.  Here's the poster announcing the event and the series:

And here's Karma Nabulsi introducing the event:

And here are some of those TVs I mentioned:

 

See that last one?  Can't see a thing on the screen hardly. But look at those phones.  Quaint huh?

And now some posters:

Now I'm hoping the posters will mostly speak for themselves because I spent the whole evening snapping and tweeting the narratives so if you want the narrative I tweeted with the pic please check out @jewssf on twitter:

 

 

Now that last one doesn't hang well with the others.  It was narrated on the wall as 1980 and nothing else, or artist unknown.  It's the only one that drew criticism on twitter and I must admit I found it kind of perplexing.  But see what Nick Denes had to say about the whole exhibition over at MEMO :

It was a lengthy and quite difficult process choosing these posters, as there are so many striking works one might choose," says Nick Denes, Co-Director of the series. "But our aim has been - insofar as we can restrain ourselves - not to pick the 'best' or our 'favourite' works, but rather ones that were widely used or seen in their time, and, or which represent key aesthetic or thematic concerns.

And it's that "thematic concern" that this last poster conveys: international solidarity, the magnet that draws so many of us to the Palestinian cause.

Here are some afterthought shots taken just while the event was closing and I was leaving:

 

And here's my parting shot:

There's a whole site, The World is With Us, devoted to the exhibition and its whereabouts at any given time. It does the exhibition far more justice than I have done here but you really have to be there to appreciate what the exhibition has achieved.

Follow @LondonPFF on Twitter

I was just going through some of the tweets from @LondonPFF and they're well worth a follow and not just for the upcoming film and poster series I blogged earlier.

Here's a tweet announcing just one element of the series:

Internationalist 3-bill: May17 at @BarbicanCentre: Soviet newsreel, US agitprop, Dutch mastery http://t.co/xtgiKajDy8 pic.twitter.com/oGiNZSkhiP
— LondonPFF (@LondonPFF) May 10, 2014

The World is With Us, Global Film and Poster Art from the Palestinian Revolution, 1968 - 1980

This is just a pointer to a Middle East Monitor interview with Nick Denes, one of the directors of the London Palestine Film Festival, about the upcoming cinema and gallery series with the above title.

Here's a taste:

"We want to capture this sense of their being 'living' media rather than artificially sacralised or displayed with a gallery-style reverence that was never their original intention, and which jars with their very nature as political ephemera, however wonderful their artistic content might be."

And another:

The World is With Us, Global Film and Poster Art from the Palestinian Revolution, 1968-1980 will begin at the Barbican Cinema on 16 May and continue at the Rich Mix until 14 June.

2013 Palestine Film Festival

From the Palestine Film Festival website:

This year's programme comprises 24 events at the Barbican Cinema and University of London, involving 38 titles, 24 guest speakers, and the UK's first international conference on Palestine and the Moving Image. 

View the 2013 Festival trailer. 

Opening with a gala screening of David Koff's trailblazing 1981 documentary, Occupied Palestine, the 2013 programme boasts historic depth with rarities including a thematic session marking the 25th anniversary of the first intifada, and an outing for Elia Suleiman's debut,Homage by Assassination (part of 1991 portmanteau The Gulf War... What Next?). 

There's plenty of fresh material on offer too, with some 20 premieres, including a sharp new doc on life in the Syrian Golan heights, a revealing account of the vast quarrying industries in the West Bank, and the story of a spectacular kite flying world record bid in Gaza. Exceptional shorts and animations run throughout the programme, along with some bold new experimental works from Palestine and beyond. 

Tickets are now on sale.Scroll down to explore the programme. 
(click on film stills for individual synopses and selected film trailers) 

Download the LPFF13 PROGRAMME in full (pdf, 2.5mb)

Details of pre-festival events here.

Palestine Film Festival

Karma Nabulsi in The Guardian on the Palestine Film Festival:

The perilous art of choosing a film on Palestine for an international audience may appear fraught with elephant traps. Weighted down by more than 40 years of military occupation and 60 years of dispossession, and comprising the largest refugee population in the world, Palestine is a touchstone for passion and political engagement across the world. Is a film about it inherently too political, too ideologically rigid to enlighten, or indeed entertain? Do the unhappy politics of the place trump any chance of critical engagement on a film's artistic merit, or allow room for happy accident and serendipity in choosing a film?

The long-running London Palestine film festival, established at London University more than 20 years ago and held annually at the Barbican since 2005, arrived at a highly unexpected and bold solution to this challenge. It somehow manages to transcend this traditional dilemma by holding fast to a few simple but radical aims: to constantly push boundaries, disrupt our conventional understandings, make us see it all anew, and open it up for us once more. With each screening, discussion, roundtable, photography exhibit, director's conversation and artist's event, the world of Palestine is seen yet again, as if for the first time.

Under this mandate, a serious but ebullient festival has emerged. In order to keep shaking things up, a key premise was to universalise Palestine. Although we are in the midst of a wave of Palestinian film talent, they forgo the confines of a traditional "national cinema" series for an unmistakably internationalist one. This year's festival showcases 30 works by artists working in 12 different countries, and across genres from video art to biopic, puts up work for UK premieres (16 this year), and shows cutting-edge documentaries such as Mahmoud al Massad's mesmerising This Is My Picture When I Was Dead.

It also regularly celebrates archive gems, this year showing the recently restored Far from Vietnam (1967), on which Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais and Joris Ivens all worked. The result is a carnival of cinematic styles and concerns that transcend and unite the historical, the aesthetic, and the political in film, and that is why it works so well. Each film and event challenges – either obliquely or directly – our thinking around Palestine today.

The festival also plays a major role as the platform for introducing Palestinian films and film-makers to UK audiences. Since its inception in 1998, more than 320 works have been shown, nearly half by Palestinians. The festival's focus on Palestinian work unites established and emerging artists. This year's festival opens with Zindeeq (pictured), a remarkable work of sublime beauty. Bold, dangerous and difficult, it is the latest work of pioneering Palestinian auteur Michel Khleifi. But it also contains a body of work from a new generation of film-makers such as May Odeh, Rima Essa and Abdallah al Ghoul.

This year the programme highlights pressing contemporary issues, as well. Vibeke Løkkeberg's astonishing Tears of Gaza offers a searing account of the human impact of the 2008-09 war in Gaza, while a triple-bill on 7 May focuses on the tunnels that furnish Gaza's precarious lifeline. And this year includes the rare chance to see Heiny Srour's 1984 feminist masterwork, Leila and the Wolves (co-presented with Birds Eye View film festival), as well as the UK premiere of Dahna Abourahme's groundbreaking documentary on the women of Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp in south Lebanon, The Kingdom of Women. Breathtaking, uplifting, heartbreaking, inspiring: welcome to Palestine.

The London Palestine film festival runs from 29 April to 11 May. Details:palestinefilm.org

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