18 July, 2024
DokuFest is pleased to announce a specially curated programme titled No Other Land: Films on Palestine.
With war in Gaza showing no end in sight and with it the situation of Palestinian people caught in the whirlwind of the war, as well as with the overall political and security situation in the Middle East boiling to a point of an all-out war, a decision to bring a program of films that shed light to the Palestinian Israeli conflict, its root and its consequences felt both, urgent and needed.
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel by renowned Palestinian filmmaker Micha Kleifi and Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan is perhaps most known film about the complexities of two nations living on the same land. Shot in the summer of 2002, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi travelled together from the south to the north of their country along the line of the partition of Palestine from 1947, bringing back a film that at times feels like a disorientating journey across what actually is a rather tiny territory.
Another film shot by both, Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers is No Other Land, a powerful record of life in occupied Palestine. It documents the destruction of the community under Israeli occupation in the village of Masafer Yatta in West Bank and the resistance of the forced displacement of its inhabitants, while at the same time showing the unlikely friendship which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.
In Three Promises, composed almost entirely of family home videos filmed in the early 2000s by filmmaker’s mother, we see a family self-portrait in wartime that reverberates with Palestine’s long harrowing history and present struggles for freedom.
Three short films round up the selection, Kamal Aljafari’s UNDR is a collection of archival footage that constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion and which works as a sort of companion piece to its feature length work A Fidai Film, that is also screening at the festival.
Miranda Pennell’s Man Number 4, brilliantly narrated by famed filmmaker and Pennell’s husband John Smith, is a harrowing and disturbing look at a photograph shot in November of 2023 in Gaza and posted on social media, questioning what it means to be an onlooker.
Another form of resistance for Palestinians in a culture constantly threatened with erasure is dabke, a musical genre and traditional folk dance. This is exactly what Dancing with Palestine film is about. Both a document of the need of collective memory, as well as a testament to Palestinians’ deep love of life and an insistent act of contribution to the archive of Palestine in the present.
Together with several other films about Arab Israeli conflict that are appearing across other strands, with debates at the festival and with a musical performance of a Palestinian band, this is a modest attempt of the festival to open up the discussion about one of the longest and deadliest conflict in the world at times when such discussions are being suppressed widely.
Eyal Sivan and Kamal Aljafari will be attending the festival for the screenings, talks and Q&A’s of their films.
See the list of the films and their descriptions here.
