Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch 3: Norwegian Co-Productions and Solidarity
“Somebody watches something, they’re touched, and then [what]?”
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.
NO OTHER LAND (2024) dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, & Rachel Szor
People all over the world watch petrified as Palestinians in Gaza perish in mass, starve, burn, and worse. It’s not the first ethnic cleansing and it won’t be the last– and, for those in Palestine, it’s not even necessarily something new– but the dominant presence of new media makes what’s been happening in Gaza over the past year-plus different than what happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s or in the more media-limited China of the present. In real-time, the war crimes are even more incredulous than in the history books. On some level, the conversation seems to have changed around the Israeli occupation; on another level, nothing has changed for the better, and the good-willed solidarity twists into virtue signaling without material actions. The two friends at the center of No Other Land, an Israeli journalist and a Palestinian activist, ask each other this same question in one of the festival’s two Palestinian-Norwegian co-productions. “Somebody watches something, they’re touched, and then [what]?”
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (2023) dir. Mohamed Jabaly
There is no film school in Gaza. Mohamed Jabaly had to become a filmmaker the old-fashioned way: by making films. It is the path to directorial success taken by the literal majority of successful filmmakers around the world and through film history. It also creates an issue when Jabaly visits Norway for a film festival in 2014 for his acclaimed first feature Ambulance. During his visit, the only entrance to Gaza, the Rafah Border Crossing, is shut down for the foreseeable future. The Palestinian filmmaker finds himself exiled in Tromsø, Norway, and in a legal battle with the government there to recognize his credentials as a filmmaker worthy of a work visa. He wouldn’t end up reuniting with his family for another seven years.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.