Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch 2: Memories of the Land

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.

FAMILIAR PHANTOMS (2023) dir. Søren Lind & Larissa Sansour

Palestinian cinema is unlike any other national or regional cinema. For nearly the entirety of the history of cinema, Palestine has been under violent military occupation. As this film reminds us, the Ottomans occupied the land first, then the British, before passing on their sins to Israel. The Palestinian occupation is the biggest elephant in the room of any single national cinema industry. Very few films were made before the 1948 nakba, and of those even fewer remain today; the specter lurks over the country’s cinema industry like the Nazgûl looking for the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. You just cannot find a Palestinian film unrelated to the occupation. The experimental documentary Familiar Phantoms ,co-directed by Søren Lind & Larissa Sansour, assertively confronts these unavoidable ghosts.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.

AIDA RETURNS (2024) dir. Carol Mansour

I’ve more or less spent my whole life around the Great Lakes — Ohio, Ontario, Michigan — and I plan for that to continue. This wasn’t fully by design, but as a person with Ojibwe blood in their veins, it’s also not random. Even though I do not know where I will be when I die, I’m confident that somewhere not too far away from the world’s largest body of freshwater is where my loved ones will lay me to rest. For many, where we are from more than defines who we are. Where one ends and the other begins can be impossible to untangle.

That’s also the case for Aida Abboud Mansour. Aida was born in 1928 in Yafa, Palestine, placing her in her early 20s during the nakba. Most of her life was spent in forced exile in Beirut, Lebanon before leaving for Montreal, Canada, where she would spend the last years of her life. By the time of her death in 2015, Aida spent more years living outside of Palestine than inside. Israel may have been able to take the Palestinian out of Palestine, but they could never take Palestine out of the Palestinian. She tells her daughter, director Carol Mansour, that she wishes to return home in death. Carol, who cannot travel to Palestine, arranges for two friends in Lebanon to take her mother’s ashes to Yaffa (Jaffa) and to document Aida’s final return through the lenses of their cellphone cameras.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.