Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch #1: Transnational Documentaries

The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs online from October 13 through October 22. The live component has been postponed due to the tragic current events in Palestine and Israel. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.

Here Joshua reviews Reel No. 21 A.K.A. Restoring Solidarity (The Tokyo Reel) and Erasmus in Gaza.

REEL NO. 21 A.K.A. RESTORING SOLIDARITY (THE TOKYO REEL) (2022) dir. Mohanad Yaqubi

A collection of segments of 20 16mm films by transnational militant filmmakers from the 1960s-80s on the Palestinian struggle against the occupying Israeli state, Reel No. 21 A.K.A. Restoring Solidarity (The Tokyo Reel) is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And given the current threat of ethnic-cleansing facing the Palestinian people in Gaza, the film’s powerful insistence on the role of media in the face of tragedy and as a tool of memory preservation is the film of the hour.

The films connect in as much as they share in the struggle of the Palestinian people. In form and content, they vary from tourism instructional footage to Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) agitprop. But the films are glued together through footage of the archival process itself: the editing, restoration, and digitization of the 20 films, most (if not all) of which were lost to history before director Mohanad Yaqubi (Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory) acquired them from Japanese comparative literature professor Aoe Tanami in the late 2010s.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.