Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch 3: More 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.
THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS (2022) dir. Joshua Vis
Most documentaries at the Boston Palestine Film Festival, at least since I first began covering it last year, are made primarily with a Palestinian audience in mind. This isn’t always the case (sometimes to the detriment of the films), but it’s the norm, and that makes sense: it’s the Boston Palestine Film Festival, after all. It's in this context that The Law and the Prophets is the best documentary I’ve seen that situates the current status of Palestinians in the historical contexts that created and sustain the system of their Occupation.
For a newcomer to the conflict between Palestine and Israel, this is the first documentary I would recommend.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle....
SARURA: THE FUTURE IS AN UNKNOWN PLACE (2023) dir. Nicola Zabelli
Saura: The Future Is An Unknown Place is a very different type of documentary than The Law and the Prophets. A sequel to Nicola Zabelli’s 2011 documentary Tomorrow’s Land, Sarura spotlights the non-violent resistance movement called the Youth of Sumud centered in the West Bank village of At-Tuwani. They prefer the armament of video cameras to firearms, planting gardens to slow down settlers as opposed to throwing rocks.
I haven’t seen the first film, but Zabelli reuses archival footage that works like a timelapse of the Israeli settlement of the West Bank. “You did this interview 10 years ago, [on land that] we can’t go to anymore,” one of the Palestinians reports back to Zabelli in the present. The land changes over time—and the two documentaries, of the same place and with many of the same people, testify to the encroachment and land poaching by the settlers. This is a first-person record of occupation.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.