Film Festival Explores Palestinian Representations of Self
The festival begins Jan. 24 and continues through April 18, with films shown on the Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill campuses.

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Watch a scene from one of the festival films, "Like Twenty Impossibles" by Annemarie Jacir, in which a Palestinian film crew encounters an Israeli military check point.

By James Todd

The festival -- "Through Palestinian Eyes: an Exploration into Palestinian Representations of Self" -- comes three months after Duke was host for the controversial Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) conference that has inspired ongoing discussions about the Middle East conflict.

"People always talk about (Palestinian society) in terms of the conflict," said Ellen McLarney, a Duke assistant professor of the practice of Arabic language and literature who is the festival’s co-organizer. "But there has been this long tradition of a culture there that’s been articulated through various means, like through novels, a lot of poetry and film has just exploded in the last decade."

"The focus is not the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian perspective of the Arab-Israeli conflict but really Palestinian attitudes toward Palestine," said Nadia Yaqub, an assistant professor of Arabic language and literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, another of the organizers.

The festival kicks off at Duke on Monday with a screening of director Annemarie Jacir’s "Like Twenty Impossibles," which will be followed by a lecture by Jacir, a reception and screenings of two documentaries. Watch a scene from the film.

"It’s not just about the reality of what’s happening in Palestine," Jacir said about her film, which features Israeli soldiers dispersing a Palestinian film crew at a military check point. "It’s about the medium of film."

Seven more films will be shown, some at Duke and some at UNC, as the festival continues until April 18.

One documentary, "3 cm Less" follows the efforts of a Palestinian woman to understand her father, who died 30 years ago attempting to hijack an airplane.

The festival is sponsored by the Robertson Collaborative Fund, Center for the Study of Muslim Networks (Duke), Department of Asian Studies (UNC), Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations (UNC), University Center for International Studies (UNC), Center for International Studies (Duke), Dept. of Asian & African Languages & Literature (Duke), the Film/Video/Digital section of Program in Literature (Duke) and Program in Women's Studies (Duke).

The screening of the films brings up local and international politics as well as culture.

McLarney is the faculty adviser for the student group that sponsored the PSM conference, Hiwar (Arabic for "dialogue"), and served as a mediator for the university during the conference. She noted that "Through Palestinian Eyes" was planned before the PSM conference location was set.

"The conference ended up causing so much conflict on campus," McLarney said. In contrast, she hopes the medium of artistic film "can produce a more nuanced vision of what’s going on."

"Of course it’s political to do a film series like this," Yaqub said. "But it’s political in the way that any choice that you make to teach or publicize cultural artifacts is political.

"Even when you make the choice to avoid controversial topics -- that’s a political act," she said.

To illustrate the political controversy that can surround Palestinian films, Yaqub pointed to the Oscar nomination of a Palestinian film. Two years ago the Palestinian film "Divine Intervention" was denied entry for the Foreign Language Film category, even though it had won the 2002 Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, on the grounds that "Palestine" was not a country. A year later, the same film was accepted as an entry from the "Palestinian Authority."

For this year’s Oscars, the Palestinian Authority committee has nominated "The Olive Harvest" by Hanna Elias, which will by screened as part of the "Through Palestinian Eyes" festival.

Although two of the films in the UNC-Duke festival were made in collaboration with Israeli directors, the two organizers are not including Israeli films to focus on the culture they know through study and personal ties.

Yaqub was born to a Palestinian father and American mother and grew up in Lebanon; McLarney has spent five years in the Middle East and North Africa, including one summer living with a Palestinian family in Jerusalem.

"Although Palestinians are inextricably tied with Israelis," Yaqub said, "they aren’t only ‘the Arab-Israeli conflict.’"