"Voices of Palestine" Summer Film Series Comes to a Close

By Nawal Atallah  

Every summer The Jerusalem Fund organizes and hosts the "Voices of Palestine" Summer Film Series. Co-presented along with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, the purpose of the film series is to screen films that profoundly express important aspects of the Palestinian experience. Palestinian cinema and films about Palestine are growing richer, and we want to share them with the general public.

This year, we screened films that touched on a variety of topics. We started and ended the film series with the feature films "Zindeeq" and "Laila's Birthday" that star the well-known Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri.

The capacity crowd in attendance for "Laila's Birthday" appreciated the humor that can come out of tragic ironies, such as the toll the occupation has on life in Ramallah, where the film is set.

The second film in our series was a documentary on Gaza entitled "Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza)" which tells the story of how Gazans are living and moving on with their lives after the Israeli assault on the Strip in late 2008, early 2009. In the following weeks, we showed a short film entitled "Lesh Sabreen?" about two young lovers dealing with the realities of life in East Jerusalem, a documentary that explores the effects of political imprisonment in the Palestinian community of Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, "Degrees of Incarceration," and a work-in-progress documentary about the story of Yousef Elhaj, a Palestinian immigrant and long-distance father. One of our summer interns, Sana Saeed, recently wrote a review of the film, "Corner Store."

With the exception of "Laila's Birthday", none of the films screened are currently available for the viewing public. However, through word-of-mouth reviews from those in attendance, hopefully these films will gain the momentum needed to find distributors and be found in more venues in which a much wider audience can view them.

We had a very successful film series thanks to those who attended and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. We look forward to doing it again next year and we hope you can join us.

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