Reel Palestine / 2nd Edition / 2016

The 2nd installment of Reel Palestine ran from January 22nd - 30th, 2016 and presented stories that sometimes slip under the radar: stories of skateboarders, cows, women driving race cars and nostalgia for a better time. Reel Palestine film festival attempts to tear down the wall (literally) and allow viewers to cinematically travel to Palestine through the power of storytelling. Screenings and events were held across Dubai and Sharjah.

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2016 Festival Films

Speed Sisters 

Directed by Amber Fares
Documentary | 2015 | 80 mins  

The film follows the first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East. Grabbing headlines and turning heads at improvised tracks across the West Bank, these five women have sped their way into the heart of the gritty, male-dominated Palestinian street car-racing scene. When racing prodigy Marah loses her place as top female racer to glamorous Betty due to an arbitrary decision by the officials, relationships in the team are strained and Marah’s resolve and the support of her hard-working family are pushed to their limits. Weaving together their lives on and off the track, Speed Sisters takes you on a surprising journey into the drive to go further and faster than anyone thought you could.

On The Bride's Side

​Directed by Gabriele Del Grande, Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry & Antonio Augugliaro
Documentary | 2014 | 98 min

The 89 minute documentary  shows us the story of a Palestinian poet and an Italian journalist who meets five Palestinians and Syrians in Milan who entered Europe via the Italian island of Lampedusa after fleeing the war in Syria. They decide to help them complete their journey to Sweden – and hopefully avoid getting themselves arrested as traffickers – by faking a wedding. With a Palestinian friend dressed up as the bride and a dozen or so Italian and Syrian friends as wedding guests, they cross halfway over Europe on a four-day journey of three thousand kilometres.

Villa Touma

Directed by Suha Arraf
Drama | 2014 | 85 min

Villa Touma portrays three Palestinian Christian sisters who’ve lost their land and status due to the 1967 war with Israel aren’t able to face the painful new reality that’s been imposed on them, so they lock themselves away in their big house and continue to live in a time warp. Within the villa’s crumbling walls, the sisters live in their own personal bubbles, each with her own secrets, dreams and failed love story, hidden behind a mask of manners and propriety. 

When their young niece, Badia, walks into their lives, she challenges their stifling routine and turns their world upside down, obliterating the deadly silence they lived in.

Love, Theft and Other Entanglements

Directed by  Muayad Alayan
Drama | 2015 | 90 min

The film explores the protagonist, Mousa, who gets into the trouble of his life when he steals the wrong car. What he thought was an Israeli car and an easy way to make money in his impoverished Palestinian refugee camp turns out to be a load of misfortune when he discovers a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the trunk.

Mousa's hopes of paying the bribe that will guarantee him an exit visa out of the country and away from his wrecked love affair dissipate as he finds himself on the run from Palestinian militias and the Israeli intelligence.

Infiltrators 

Directed by Khaled Jarrar
Documentary | 2013 | 70 min

 Infiltrators is a visceral “road movie” that chronicles the daily travails of Palestinians of all backgrounds as they seek routes through, under, around, and over a bewildering matrix of barriers. Following this high stakes “game” of cat and mouse with a handheld video camera, Khaled Jarrar’s debut documentary was the standout success at the 2012 Dubai International Film Festival, winning the Muhr Arab Documentary Prize, the Special Jury Prize, and the International Critics Prize.

The Wanted 18 

Directed by Amer Shomali & Paul Cowan
​Documentary | 2014 | 75 min

It’s 1987, and the first Palestinian popular movement in the West Bank is rising. Residents want local alternatives to Israeli goods, including milk, which they’ve been buying from an Israeli company. And so begins the strange story of the 18 cows.

The plot is hatched by pacifist intellectuals and professionals. Not your typical dairy farmers. These “lactivists” forge ahead anyway, buying 18 cows and smuggling them into the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.


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Roshmia

Directed by Salim Abu Jabal
​​Documentary | 2014 | 70 min 

Since 1956, 80-year-old Yousef has lived in a shack in the Roshmia Valley with his wife Amna, a refugee from Yasoor. Life is quiet until the municipality of Haifa plans to build a road across the valley to connect the Mediterranean to Mount Carmel – which will require the demolition of the couple’s home and force them to find a new home. Aouni, their sponsor, acts as a middleman between them and the municipality and attempts to secure a compensation for them. However, the negotiations lead to tension amongst the three.

When I Saw You

Directed by Annemarie Jacir
​Drama | 2012 | 98 min

1967. The world is alive with change: brimming with reawakened energy, new styles, music and an infectious sense of hope. In Jordan, a different kind of change is underway as tens of thousands of refugees pour across the border from Palestine. Having been separated from his father in the chaos of war, Tarek, 11, and his mother Ghaydaa, are amongst this latest wave of refugees. Placed in "temporary" refugee camps made up of tents and prefab houses until they would be able to return, They wait, like the generation before them who arrived in 1948. With difficulties adjusting to life in Harir camp and a longing to be reunited with his father, Tarek searches a way out, and discovers a new hope emerging with the times. 

Epicly Palestine'd

Directed by Phil & Theo 
​Documentary | 2015 | 26 min

"You feel different. You feel unique." Three years ago, no-one had ever seen a skateboard in the West Bank, save for a few plastic ones in the odd toyshop. It’s still a new thing, but there’s excitement about this emerging scene. This is the story of how skateboarding began in the West Bank, told through the eyes of the local skateboarders: the journey it has led them on and the challenges facing the skate scene and living under occupation.

The Warren

Directed by James Adolphus 
​Drama, Thriller | 2014 |11 min

A documentary-style drama showing the Battle of Nablus, a part of Operation Defensive Shield, fought from April 5 to April 8, 2002 in the Palestinian city of Nablus in the West Bank between the Israel Defense Forces and Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad which resulted in the death of seventy Palestinian fighters and eight Palestinians civilians as well as one IDF officer, ultimately resulting in a Israeli victory.

 

Though I Know The River Is Dry

Directed by Omar Robert Hamilton 
Short | Drama | 2014 | 19 min

He has returned to Palestine. On his journey through the country he relives the trauma of his past and the choice that sent him to America - a choice between a passport for his unborn child and a safe haven for his activist brother.

Ave Maria

Directed by Basil Khalil
Short | Comedy | 2014 | 15 min

The nuns of the "Sisters of Mercy" Convent, in the middle of the West Bank wilderness, have their daily routine of silence and prayer disrupted when a family of Jewish settlers come knocking at their door for help after crashing into the convent’s wall.

Revisit some memories from Reel Palestine 2016

Reel Palestine 2016 Festival Sponsors and Community Partners

A massive thank you to our venues, with whom without we would not be able to host all of our viewers!

2016  Festival Pop-ups

Open Bethlehem

Saturday 7th May 19:00 at A4 Space, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai 
Directed by Leila Sansour 
Documentary | 2014 | 90 min​
Presented in partnership with Cinema Akil
​The screening was followed a Q&A session with the Director, Leila Sansour

Leila takes us on a tour of her hometown, Bethlehem, and through her film, focuses our attention on a human rights issue that, without sounding dramatic, is a cause for us all, irrespective of religion and nationality. For some, the political situation in Palestine seems either intractably complicated or hopeless, however Leila’s way of telling Bethlehem’s story, makes the story of Palestine legible and deeply personal and the determination and courage it has taken for her to tell it, is an inspiration for us all.​
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Trip Along Exodus​

Saturday May 21 at A4 Space, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai 
​Directed by Hind Shoufani
Documentary | 2014 | 120 min
Presented in partnership with Cinema Akil

Trip Along Exodus is a feature-length documentary exploring the last 70 years of Palestinian politics seen through the prism of the life of Dr Elias Shoufani, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, an academic writer and leftist intellectual who worked with Fateh (but was one of the leaders of the opposition to Arafat) for 20 years. He is also the father of the filmmaker and writer, Hind. The film recreates Palestinian history using archive, family photos/8mm films, macro footage, glitter, interviews and multi media formats in a video-art style documentary, which serves overall as visual poems in a book. 

La Terre Parle Arabe
​(The Land Speaks Arabic)

Saturday 14th May at A4 Space, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Directed by  Maryse Gargour
Documentary |  2007 | 61 min

​At the end of the 19th century, Zionism, a minority political movement, appeared on the international stage. As theorised by its historical leaders, it embodied the desire to create a Jewish state somewhere in the world and particularly in Palestine. At the time and for thousands of years, “la terre parle arabe”, Palestine being inhabited by the Arabs of Palestine, the Palestinians. Based on Zionist leader’s quotations, unused footage, the press of that period, official documents, interviews of historians and testimonies of pre-1948 Palestinians, “la terre parle arabe” trains a historian and a filmmaker’s eye on the explosive truth, that of the cleansing of the land of Palestine by the Zionists.

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