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Reel Palestine / 1st Edition / 2015
The first edition of Reel Palestine featured stories of maqloubeh, giraffes and nostalgia for a better time, a selection of films were screened across venues in Dubai and Sharjah between January 16 - 25 2015. Two of the seven sessions also included Q&A sessions with directors, producers and actors. The first edition of Reel Palestine was supported by the Welfare Association for Youth–WAY and the Palestine Film Foundation.The start of it all 2015 was a stepping stone in the journey of the festival and the beginning of gathering the support and enthusiasm around an ever growing community.
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2015 Festival Films
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Trip Along ExodusDirected by Hind Shoufani
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GiraffadaDirected by Rani Massalha
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My Love Awaits Me By The SeaDirected by Mais Darwazah
Documentary | 2013 | 79 min ‘How do you return to a place that only exists in your mind?’ This poetic documentary chronicles the director’s first journey back to her homeland, Palestine.
Award-winning director Mais Darwazah (Take Me Home, 2008; The Dinner, 2012) leaves a secluded life in Amman, journeying to Palestine to seek out a lover she’s never met – the late Palestinian artist Hasan Hourani. Darwazah’s travelogue mixes fairytale with reality and romance as she traces the fractured geographies and uncertain dreams of a Palestinian nation. The result is a highly original road-trip into an elusive homeland. |
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Encounter With a Lost LandDirected by Maryse Gargour
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Open BethlehemDirected by Leila Sansour
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Suspended Time
9 shorts by Palestinian filmmakers
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Eid
Directed by Saaheb Collective
Short | 2011 | 9 minutes Eid is a Palestinian Bedouin from the village of Um el Kheir who boasts a gift for transforming scrap materials into art. Using found materials he makes miniature models of the machinery of occupation, including bulldozers and helicopters. This short playfully uses stopmotion animation and interviews to revel in Eid’s creative process.
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Ismail
Directed by Nora Sharif
Short | 2012 | 28 min Ismail is a short film set in Palestine in 1949 and inspired by the late Palestinian Painter Ismail Shammout (1930-2006). The film is a social drama that explores the ideas of exodus, survival, escape, and brotherhood. It talks about Ismail’s daily life struggle to support his family after their expulsion to a refugee camp in 1948 by the Israeli forces, and his dream to go to Rome one day to learn painting.
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Maqloubeh
Directed by Nicolas Damuni
Short | 2012 | 9 min Maqloubeh is a dark comic homage to the famous Palestinian dish, following five friends confined by a curfew as they attempt to perfect the recipe. After disagreeing over ingredients and methods, they finally establish common ground and complete their meal, only to be interrupted by an unexpected guest.
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Ramallah
Directed by Flavie Pinatel
Short | Documentary | 2014 | 28 min French director Flavie Pinatel’s immersive sensory documentary Ramallah is a day-in-the-life portrait of the city, foregrounding its profound generational, cultural, and economic contrasts.
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A Sketch of Manners
Directed by Jumana Manna
Short | Experimental | 12 min A Sketch of Manners is inspired by an archival photograph depicting a 1942 masquerade ball hosted by Palestinian politician Alfred Roch (Hakim Bishara). Recreating this bon vivant scene from pre-1948 urban life, artist Jumana Manna suggests the melancholic masked figures accidentally hint at their uncertain future.
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No News
Directed by Eyas Salman
Short | 2011 | 7 min Produced by Hany Abu Assad (Paradise Now, Ford Transit), Eyas Salman's short ghost story offers an original take on the enduring consequences of the Nakba. In an abandoned cemetery, a woman rises from her grave to find herself surrounded by strangers and met with awkward silence. Confronted with questions about time, place, and times long past... this spectral presence comes to realize that nothing has changed in some 60 years, and that nothing can go back to the way it was before.
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Pink Bullet
Directed by Ramzi Hazboun
Short | 2014 | 11 min Palestinian filmmaker Ramzi Hazboun lives and works in Ramallah. In his stoner-caper, Pink Bullet, a group of friends in their late twenties find themselves tangling with the city’s criminal underbelly while struggling to separate hallucination from reality.
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Izriqaq
Directed by Rama Mari
Short | 2013 | 20 min In a land dotted with killing machines, a crime can be easily covered up... Izriqaq is a story about the damage that occurs to a society after decades of desensitisation to violence and killings. It is about the never-ending loop of patriarchy that takes hold in a society never in control of its own destiny.
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Reel Palestine 2015 Festival Sponsors and Community Partners
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2015 Pop - Up
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Nun Wa Zaytun
Directed by Emtiaz Diab
Documentray | 2014 | 50 min Saturday 30th May at A4 Space in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
In Nun Wa Zaytun, a new unique docudrama, its director Emtiaz Diab takes us on a road trip through the hills, valleys and villages of Palestine, following Murad, the cinema-lover who has made it his mission to bring Palestinian cinema to Palestinians in forgotten and marginal communities in the West Bank. While listening to the stories of the people Murad meets with his Mobile Cinema, trekking from one venue to another, when scattered communities come together for a moment to watch films shot in Palestine over 20 years and in which some of them even acted. This moment of communal harmony and artistic pleasure contrasts rudely with the bitter realities they face in coping with encroaching settlements, the attrition of ancestral land and the daily brutalities of occupation and poverty.
From all these unknown and proud Palestinians we learn that their attachment to their land, their homes and families and to their disappearing way of life remains as strong as the Zaytun roots and branches, against all odds and despite all they have endured for generations. |
Reel Palestine 2015 was featured in:
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