Cinema of Palestinian Return
Friday, May 3 – Saturday, May 18
Anthology Film Archives
The month of May marks the 76th year of the nakba, a commemoration soaked in the blood of Gaza, whose people have faced relentless massacre and dispossession by Western and Zionist forces. Preserving, circulating, and politically engaging with the cultural production of the Palestinian struggle is a minimum demand. The films that emerged from this struggle are tethered to the dreams of the Palestinian people, who despite setback and catastrophe continue to assert their right to return to their homeland.
“Cinema of Palestinian Return” is guest-programmed by Kaleem Hawa and Nadine Fattaleh.
GAZA
Mustafa Abu Ali
SCENES OF THE OCCUPATION FROM GAZA / MASHAHID MIN AL-IHTILAL FI GHAZA
1973, 13 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. [It] employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. It was the only such project produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.” –PALESTINE FILM INSTITUTE
Khaled Hamada
THE KNIFE / AL-SIKKIN
1972, 87 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“Ghassan Kanafani’s novella ‘All That’s Left to You’ (1966) is perhaps one of the most significant Palestinian texts, navigating an abstract symbology of collaboration, violation, and resistance in Gaza. Its adaptation, THE KNIFE, is a largely-unseen and necessarily contingent film. Produced under the auspices of the Syrian General Cinema Organization (GCO), just as Tewfiq Saleh’s THE DUPES (1973), it too changes the end of its originating Kanafani text, in this case flattening it. What results then is a morass of Arab reaction, at once ghostly beach pastoral and nightmarish bedroom narrative, unfinished and elliptical.” –Kaleem Hawa