Three Promises, directed by Yousef Srouji
The Palestine Film Institute arrives with four docs-in-progress at Cannes Docs, the feature doc Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege selected for ACID, the Palestinian-produced The Sun and the Looking Glass nominated for the Doc Alliance Award. Fiction interest is found within the Critics Awards for Arab Films and the selection of the restored Friendships’ Death (1987) for Cannes Classics.
2021 marks the fourth time the Palestine Film Institute has partnered with Cannes Docs to present a slate of soon-to-be completed documentaries to the great and the good of the international marketplace.
The Institute took a break in 2020, for understandable reasons. “But this year we’re back,” says Mohanad Yaqubi, PFI consultant and Public Program Curator. “It’s very important for us because 80% of Palestinian production is documentary. For us, it’s very much about documentary.”
Non-fiction has been a feature of Palestine film output since “the beginning of the cinema,” Yaqubi continues, but it wasn’t until the 1960s when documentary production began to come into its own. “There was a big movement related to the Third Cinema, lots of documentaries, whether Palestinians or international film makers making films about the Palestinian struggle, the Palestinian revolution and connecting it with other movements that were going on around the world.”
“Then in the 80s, there was the first Intifada,” continues Yaqubi of the development of Palestinian documentary. “Obviously documentary and politics are very connected together, and with that first Intifada there was international media coming into Palestine, especially into the West Bank and Gaza, and from there many Palestinians trained with filmmakers at international media like BBC and CNN. They started in the mid-80s as fixers, but at the beginning of the 1990s they [Palestinians] became the filmmakers.”
Many contemporary Palestinian filmmakers are found among the international diaspora, Yaqubi underlines. “That’s what makes the industry very lucid, I would say. There is no centralized funding or no state funding for these kind of documentaries, but filmmakers manage to make collaborations and co-productions, depending on where they’re living. So a Palestinian who immigrated to Sweden in the eighties, and is second generation, now he’s getting his funding from Swedish Film Institute.”
At the July 9 Palestine Showcase four diverse docs-in-progress will be presented.
Alpes by Nael Khleifi reveals how “in the secrecy of the dark and cold night, women and men come to the aid of migrants crossing the French-Italian border. In solidarity, they organize themselves illegally to escape police checks and the repression that rages on these mountain trails, to protect those risking their lives attempting to enter France.” The project is in post-production, is 95% financed ahead of an October 2021 release, and is produced by Alice Lemaire of Sourat Films, Belgium.
In Asmahan Bkerat’s Jordan/Canada production Concrete Land, budgeted at €170,000 and currently in post-production with a mooted May 2022 delivery date, we observe the lives of a nomadic Bedouin family in its struggle to hold on to its traditional life under the pressures of urbanisation. Their only wish as a family is to stay together, with their loyal yet eccentric pet sheep Badrya firmly by their side.
The Palestine/Egypt/United States project Three Promises, directed by Yousef Srouji and in late production/early post-production, features a mother who must navigate the impossible question of whether to take her family and flee their homeland as destruction and danger escalates beyond the walls of their home.
Finally, in Alex Bakri’s The Last Projectionist (Odeh Films, Palestine/Kaske Film, Germany), Hussein is the last projectionist of the old cinema in Jenin, which is renovated by a German NGO. He desperately tries to convince them of his skills hoping to get his old job back. But his handicraft knowledge, and passion for cinema might not be enough, as times have changed. In post-production, 51% of the project’s €150,000 budget is secured ahead of its proposed December 2021 completion.
“The trauma of exile becomes part of the [documentary] DNA,” says Yaqubi of his Palestine filmmakers. “But what I like about this year’s Showcase that it’s not about current affairs. They’re all going into other spaces and other times.”
“Like Nael Khleifi who made Alpes,” Yaqubi continues. “He grew up in Belgium, but this film is really about immigrants, immigrants from everywhere, crossing the Alps. When you look at it, it might be like another immigrant film, but when you see the Palestinian perspective, you will see a different sensibility. It’s more like a solidarity or a vision that you can see and understand, and be in sympathy with, it’s more than just documenting.
“And the other filmmakers as well, they’re using archives, claiming time, claiming spaces in their films, and not only telling us – no, they are trying to solve their own traumas as well by dealing with these issues of politics. So we really can’t separate that political aspect.”
