Reel Palestine / 3rd Edition / 2017
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​Reel Palestine's 3rd installment of the best and latest in Palestinian film ran from January 20th-28th 2017 across community venues in Dubai including  Alserkal Avenue and in Sharjah at the Mirage City Cinema in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation. The 3rd edition of the festival showed a selection of  documentaries, dramas, short films and comedies screened with an additional live event hosted by Amer Zahr at the Jamjar. 

2017 Festival Films

Degrade

​Directed by Arab and Tarzan Nasser
Drama  | 2015 | 85 minutes

In Gaza, two hairdressers and ten customers of various ages and backgrounds spend the day trapped in a beauty salon while Hamas police fight a gang in the street.

3,000 Nights​

​Directed by Mai Masri
Drama | 2015 | 103 minutes

Layal, a newlywed Palestinian schoolteacher, is arrested after being falsely accused and sentenced to 8 years of prison. She is transferred to a high security Israeli women’s prison where she encounters a terrifying world in which Palestinian political prisoners are incarcerated with Israeli criminal inmates. When she discovers she is pregnant, the prison director pressures her to abort the baby and spy on the Palestinian inmates. Resilient, and still in chains, Layal gives birth to a baby boy. Through her struggle to raise her son behind bars, and her relationship with the other prisoners, she manages to find a sense of hope and a meaning to her life. 

Gaza Surf Club

Directed by Philip Gnadt & Mickey Yamine
Documentary | 2016 | 87 minutes

Gaza – a strip of land with a population of 1.7 million citizens, wedged between Israel and Egypt and isolated from the outside world. 42 kilometers of coastline with a harbor that no longer services ships. Hardly anything gets in to Gaza and even less get’s out. Our protagonists are part of the surf community of Gaza City. Round about 40 surfboards have been brought into the country over the past decades with great effort and despite strict sanctions. It is those boards that give them an opportunity to experience a small slice of freedom - between the coastal reminder of a depressing reality and the Israeli-controlled 6 mile marine border.
 

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me

Directed by Juamana Manna
Documentary | 2015 | 68 minutes

A magical substance flows into me opens with a crackly voice recording. The voice is that of ethnomusicologist Dr. Robert Lachmann. who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”. Jumana Manna—herself a Palestinian from Jerusalem—follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban & rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within historical Palestine. 
 

The Idol

Directed by Hany Abu Assad
Feature | Drama | 2015 | 100 minutes

Gaza. Synonymous to so many with conflict, destruction and despair but to Mohammed Assaf, and his sister Nour, Gaza is their home and their playground. It's where they, along with their best friends Ahmad and Omar, play music, football and dare to dream big. Their band might play on second hand, beaten up instruments but their ambitions are sky-high. For Mohammed and Nour, nothing less than playing the world famous Cairo Opera Hall will do. It might take them a lifetime to get there but, as Mohammed will find out, some dreams are worth living for.

Electrical Gaza

Directed by Rosalind Nashashibi 
Short  | 2015 | 18 minutes

In Electrical Gaza Nashashibi combines her footage of Gaza, and the fixer, drivers and translator who accompanied her there, with animated scenes. She presents Gaza as a place from myth; isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access and highly charged.

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Abu Ammar is Coming​

Directed by Naeem Mohaiemen
Short | Documentary | 2016 | 16 minutes

A photograph circulates, showing five men staring out of a window. Actually, only four look out; the last man breaks protocol and looks at the camera. The light has a soft glow. The stage is a bombed building. All five men wear military fatigues; the color must have been olive green. Snapped by a Magnum photographer in 1982, the image is a teasing enigma. Arabic newspapers claim it as evidence of Bangladeshi fighters in the PLO (Fatah faction). Go a little deeper into the memory hole and sediments will darken the third world international.

Donor Opium

Directed by Mariam Shahin & George Azar
Short | Documentary​ | 2011 | 25 minutes

Donor Opium takes a critical look at the impact of the last 20 years of international aid to Palestinian communities in the occupied territories. The film explores whether the declared goals of all the support—peace and the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state—have in fact been its actual result, or the exact opposite

The Embroiderers

Directed by Maeve Brennan
Short | Documentary | 2016 | 23 minutes

The Embroiderers documents the stories of six women working with Palestinian embroidery today. Through personal accounts, the film explores the significance of this intimate and deeply political material and how it continues to give form to ideas of Palestinian heritage, history, labour and resistance. Commissioned for At the Seams: a Political History of Palestinian Embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman for the Palestinian Museum, 2016. 

Samia

Directed by Ammar Al-Beik
Short | Documentary | 2009 | 40 minutes

A trail of memories connects disparate places, from the film director in Syria and the artist Samia Halaby who paints and films Ramallah, to Bisan who wanders aimlessly through Jerusalem. Guided by Samia’s paintings of the olives and the wind of Palestine, gathering the stones and soil of Ramallah that are the “words of the Palestinian people,” the film evokes the space of exiled Palestinians. Their gaze, thoughts, and unspoken words become the light of the film that reflects back on the audience.

In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain

Directed by Larissa Sansour
Short | Fiction | 2015 | 29 minutes

 In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity. A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands.
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I Am Not Afraid of the Soldiers

Directed by Rinske Bosch
Short | Documentary | 2016 | 20 minutes

Soldiers who throw tear gas at you, keep an eye on you everyday and even burst into your home and take your brother Yazan has experienced this. He lives in a Palestinian refugee camp, with a big wall around it and watch towers. Yazan wants change, but how? Though the Israeli soldiers at the Wall are not listening to the children, they are watching. Together with his friends Yazan makes a poster with his story. They want to hang it on the most dangerous place in the camp. Near the soldiers. Will they succeed?
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Check out the highlights of the Reel Palestine 2017 Festival

Amer Zahr in Dubai: Straight from Palestine 

Reel Palestine 2017 presented comedian Amer Zahr to over 150 people with a special stand-up solo show hosted at the jamjar.

As an Arab-American comedian, speaker, writer, and adjunct professor at University of Detroit Mercy School of Law Amer Zahr has headlined packed houses at New York City's world-famous Carnegie Hall and the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. He is the founder of comedy festivals in Ramallah and Michigan and . holds an MA in Middle East Studies and a JD (law degree), both from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

Revisit some memories from Reel Palestine 2017

Reel Palestine 2017 Festival Sponsors 

Thank you to our sponsors for supporting Reel Palestine's 2017 film festival!

Presenting Partner
​We would like to thank our presenting partner Cinema Akil for their continuous support and belief in our mission

Community Partners 

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Reel Palestine 2017 was featured in: 

2017 Festival Pop-Ups

Suspended Time

Friday, November 17th at The Yard in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
​Produced by Idioms Films, 2014
Anthology Films | 2014 | 59 min
​Presented in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Cinema Akil and Concrete.

​Suspended Time was conceived as a way to understand the status quo of image production twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington DC in 1993. In 2013, Palestinian production house Idioms Film issued an open call inviting Palestinian filmmakers to propose films reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Suspended Time compiles the nine short pieces commissioned for production. 

While We Wait, a meditative, immersive installation, commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, was show in Concrete from 6-18 November 2017.  The artwork has been designed by Palestinian architects and designers Elias and Yousef Anastas (AAU ANASTAS). 

​Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory

Wednesday, September 20th at Cinema Akil pop-up, Warehouse G59, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Directed by Mohanad Yaquibi
Documentary, Experimental | 2015 | 90 mins  
In collaboration with Cinema Akil and the #NOWPLAYING programme. 

​The film offers a panoramic view of the modern history of Palestine through the unseen lenses of unsung protagonists. Mohanad Yaqubi's long-awaited feature debut presents a rapid, non-didactic visual history carefully assembled over seven years of research in archives Paris, Rome, London, Amman and Beirut.  “ … and for those who suffer from invisibility, camera would be their weapon.” Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory traces the fragments of a revolution, splicing images then from a dream for freedom, using films from the Palestinian struggle cinema, a term used for films produced in relation to the Palestinian revolution during the period between 1968 and 1982. 
 

​Series of Shorts 

Tuesday, May 30th at  A4 Space, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
​Directed by Farah Nabulsi
Screened at A4 Space, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai

​Oceans of Injustice
For decades, a gross injustice has been perpetuated against an entire people. Through consumption of news media, we think we understand what they are going through. But we have no idea.

​Today They Took My Son
A mother coping with her young son being taken away by a military system. Her helplessness to prevent the cruel and inhumane treatment she knows he is experiencing is more than any mother can bear. This happens to more than 700 Palestinian children a year.

​The Nightmare of Gaza
A haunting audio journey of a woman in the streets of Gaza after the bombs cease. She has been helping others, but then realises it is her who now needs the help.

Coffee for All Nations

Sunday, May 14th at A4 Space, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
​Directed  by Wafa Jamil
Documentary | 2015 | 52 minutes
 A discussion was hosted by Visualising Palestine after the screening.

In the year of 1948, Abed and his family were forced by the Israeli army to abandon their home in (Al-Walaja) village near Bethlehem and move to Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Resilient, Abed decides to go back to his land and live in a Kanani cave that he discovered until the end of his life. He plans to turn his new home into a coffee shop and transform his own tragedy into a project that will provide him an income and allow him to share his one true possession and a stunning view.

Coffee for All Nations is a story of hope and resilience, presenting a fresh backdrop to the injustices caused by war and occupation.