Palestinian Film Series

In a game of free association, the word “Palestinian” might not conjure up images of pen-pal programs, love triangles or sightseeing tours. Indeed, after last semester, the word might more aptly raise emotions that have more to do with Duke students than with Palestinians themselves—memories of editorials, speeches and ceaseless arguments are all more accessible than are mental maps of shifting boundaries. But Through Palestinian Eyes: An Exploration into Palestinian Representations of Self seeks to bring the focus back to the humans who experience the real struggle—Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The semester-long film festival includes films by women, experimental shorts, documentaries, a memorial to late Palestinian academic Edward Said and, of course, politics. “We didn’t want to just have documentaries and have it be just about politics,” said organizer Ellen McLarney, assistant professor of the practice of Asian and African languages and literature. The effort is the culmination of nearly a year of preparation by the festival’s organizers. McLarney began working with Nadia Yaqub, assistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, during March 2004. The two procured seed money for the project in the form of a grant from the Robertson Collaborative Fund. Then they began the selection of films. “We had a summer of Palestinian film-watching,” McLarney said. She and Yaqub viewed film after film, but not together. McLarney spent the time in California and was able to take advantage of the University of California at Berkeley’s extensive collection of Arab cinema. “The way we came up with the films was a little chaotic,” she said, due to her and Yaqub’s interest in representing different aspects of Palestinian culture. The opening event, which occurred this past Monday, featured a night of films by Palestinian women, showcasing a short film and two documentaries. Like Twenty Impossibles blurs the line between documentary and scripted film by placing a realistic cast in an all-too-realistic situation. When a film crew tries to skirt the long lines at a border checkpoint, the director decides to drive around the checkpoint and enter Israel through a secret back road. That risky decision endangers the entire crew when the van is stopped at a surprise military checkpoint. Soldiers open the van and separate the crew, but the intrepid cameraman keeps filming throughout the encounter. From there, everything falls apart: communication dissipates, the sound disintegrates, the film flashes in and out and the actor is held on a rocky hill as his crew drives away down the road. The audience is left helpless in the final long, bumpy shot. Filmmaker Annemarie Jacir was on hand after the screening to moderate a discussion that quickly turned to the subject of politics. She called her film a metaphor for the situation of broken borders. Jacir’s presence, McLarney said, was a good way to frame the entire festival through a discussion about objectivity and representation. “It’s all representative. History is sometimes no more factual than a literary perspective,” McLarney said. Still, “the films tend to be so very politicized that I do worry about it being propagandistic.” The festival comes to Duke at a time when sensitivities are especially heightened. McLarney said that when the Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference “really started brewing,” she wished the festival could have run concurrently because of its different approach. “A film festival is relatively benign in that respect: it’s passive viewing; you can get a perspective without arguing with an actual human beings,” she said. Director Azza el-Hassan is an active player in her film 3 cm Less. She moves between the past and present as a narrator of her own Palestinian experience and a moderator for the voices of other women. One piece of el-Hassan’s project is supposed to be a film for a friend about her mother Hagar, a woman made legendary by her successful fight to bring her husband’s body home from Colombia. Another woman who lost her father, Ra’eda, calls on el-Hassan to piece together the death of her airplane hijacker father over 30 years before. El-Hassan, happy to oblige and ready to exploit Ra’eda’s emotion, follows Ra’eda to the Old City of Jerusalem to meet men who admired her father and to a cafZ in Haifa to meet an Israeli who calls her father a terrorist. Ra’eda never knows that the ‘Israeli’ is an actor hired by el-Hassan. In Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, two teenage Palestinian girls living in refugee camps in different countries come into contact through an inter-camp penpal program. When Israeli forces unilaterally withdraw from Southern Lebanon in May 2000, the girls meet for the first time at the border between Israel and Lebanon. Contact deepens what were previously pen-and-paper relationships by matching a face to a letter. One of the film's most universal scenes features three teenage girls—who quickly ascertain that they have all been receiving love letters from the same two boys in Lebanon—as they sit on a bed and talk about love. The illusion of teenage normalcy is broken, however, when the same girls use their hands and slingshots to hurl stones and concrete fragments at Israeli soldiers. “For Mahmoud,” “For Hassan,” they say, as if their stones are a letter. McLarney is aware that the festival will not be all things to all people. “I am the Arabic professor, so my field of representation is the Arab world. I don’t want to be biased, but there’s no way I could ever talk about Israeli cinema, or even that side of the issue, because my whole training has been in Arabic and Arabic literature. It’s not some sort of intentional elision of the Israeli side of the story,” she said. Through Palestinian Eyes: An Exploration into Palestinian Representations of Self continues through the semester with screenings at both Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The next presentation, an evening of two documentary films honoring the late Edward Said, is on Wednesday, Feb. 16 in White Lecture Hall.