Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch 2: Alam and Bir'em
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.
ALAM (2022) dir. Firas Khoury
Earlier in 2023 the State of Israel banned public displays of the Palestinian flag. The flag is an “identification with terrorism,” according to far-right national security minister Ben Gvir. This is the context that Firas Khoury’s Alam (The Flag in translation) precedes by mere months. Khoury’s feature debut about an “operation” of Palestinian high schoolers to replace their school’s Israeli flag with a Palestinian one preemptively fights these alt-right policies with a creative combination of revolutionary images and sounds that only become more potent in the face of the prohibition.
School troublemaker and social flâneur Tamer (Mahmoud Bakri, a lesser-known member of the Bakri acting “dynasty”) has run out of strikes at his Palestinian school in Israel. One more mistake and he’s expelled. He doesn’t seem to care about much and wastes his time goofing off with friends and watching MILF pornos until a pretty girl (in real life) catches his attention (Maysaa’, played by Sereen Khass). The lesson he must learn is a simple one (though it’s certainly not part of the preparation for the Israeli Bagrut certificate): he has much more to lose than an education.
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BIR’EM (2022) dir. Camille Clavel
Bir’em is named after a village erased during the Nakba. A young Palestinian woman, Nagham (Sama Abuleil), returns to her family’s village and her grandfather teaches her lessons about life before and after the war in 1948. But it could have been named The Sounds of Palestine and I wouldn’t have batted an eye.
Director Camille Clavel adopts a cinematic realist style: a minimalist soundscape, frequent camera movement, strong colors, beautiful frames of human bodies cutting through gorgeous landscapes, and a series of patient long-shots. It’s not minimalist in the strictest sense of the word, but I’m not sure a single scene in the entire film makes use of more than one camera (or more than one lens, for that matter). This is not the observational mode of Béla Tarr, nor the dispassionate and sad cinema of Jia Zhangke. Bir’em is a minimalist approach where the compositions always appear just a little too beautiful to quite be true.
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