Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023): Dispatch 1: Two Documentaries
The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs in person across various venues from October 18 through October 27.
The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs in person across various venues from October 18 through October 27. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.
LYD (2023) dir. Sarah Ema Friedland & Rami Younis
This is my third year covering the Boston Palestine Film Festival for the Boston Hassle. I’ve seen almost every feature film put on by the festival in that time, and that makes for a hefty quantity of documentaries. Lyd is probably the best of these docs. It’s also an imaginative statement-making film that flips through speculative history to find a brave new reality where Palestinians are free and Jewish immigration to Palestine occurs peaceably and even welcomely instead of through ethnic cleansing and war.
Science fiction and documentary aren’t genres that often mingle. It’s a combination that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. Lyd, co-directed by Sarah Ema Friedland & Rami Younis, makes a feast of it. The documentary comes from the voice of the city of Lyd. And I mean voice literally: the city narrates its own story — from the once de facto first capital of Palestine through nakba and to refugee camp — through the voice of actress Maisa Abd Elhadi.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
THREE PROMISES (2023) dir. Yousef Srouji
In most of the world, children cannot quickly discern the difference between missiles, motor shells, and sound bombs, let alone respond appropriately to each. This is not the case in the occupied territories of Palestine. The children in this part of the world do know those differences, and their knowledge of the categories of violence might one day be the difference between life and death. Such knowledge is so mundane to Palestinians in the West Bank that it finds its way onto the family footage of first-time documentarian Yousef Srouji’s childhood in the midst of Israel’s retaliation to the Second Intifada.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.