by Alex Deleon for <filmfestivals.com>
The sixteenth edition of the Arab Film Festival (which travels to five cities in California) opened here on Friday, October 19 with a festive reception at the Screen writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. This is an intensive three day event which will screen as many films as can be squeezed into a long weekend. The opening night film was "Man Without a Cell Phone", a debut feature by Palestinian filmmaker Sameh Zoabi who has won various...
Barbican FilmThe London Palestine Film Festival 2012 Friday 20 April – Wednesday 25 Aprilbarbican.org.uk/film Box Office: 0845 120 7527www.palestinefilm.orgFrom Friday 20 April to Wednesday 25 April, the London Palestine Film Festival returns to the Barbican. Opening with the UK Premiere of Sameh Zoabi’s debut feature, Man Without a Cellphone, the 2012 festival showcases more than 40 works, including a rare journey into the British imperial film archives, Susan Sontag’s striking 1974 film ...
THIS IS MY LAND…HEBRON is among the most important films featured at the June 2011 New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival. It is an outstanding Italian-Israeli documentary coproduced by Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson which has received many rewards since its release in 2010. The film presents interviews with Israeli journalists and politicians as well as statements by spokes persons for the settlers and Palestinians. It provides an extraordinary insight into the mindsets of the warring p...
Bruno Chatelin: Giuseppe I have just screened Ensemble by Mohamed Fekrane as part of the Tolerance day film program, this is a great idea, how did it start?
Giuseppe Cocciarelli: I received two months ago an email from this group of filmmakers in Tel Aviv where Palestinians and Israeli worked together on the same subject and made the film called “The coffee project”.
"Coffee – Between Reality and Imagination" is a cinematic collaboration between young Israeli and P...
The round-table discussion “Division and Unity: Cinema in the Middle East” took place on Tuesday, November 18th at Stavros Tornes theatre, as part of the 49th Thessaloniki’s International Film Festival spotlight on Middle Eastern cinema. According to Dr. Hassan Βadawy, professor of History and Archeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Middle East is a land of extremities, of faith in faithlessness, of being dogmatic about being non-dogmatic. ‘The major question for filmmakers ...
MEIFF to the achievements of “Arab Women Directors” & showcases a strong line-up in the “retrospective” on PalestineThe Middle East International Film Festival (MEIFF), organised by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) is keeping up the momentum of its second edition with two of its most unique and important programmes: Arab Women Directors and a Retrospective on Palestine.Arab Women DirectorsThe Director of MEIFF, Nashwa Al Ruwaini explained that the Arab Women Dire...
Saturday, June 21-------How does one make a film based in a divided East Jerusalem that is not overtly political? That was the challenge for French director Georgi Lazarevski in his documentary film THS WAY UP, which had its East Coast Premiere at SILVERDOCS yesterday.The film is set in the Our Lady of Sorrows nursing home in East Jerusalem, a venerable (if delapidated) institution for aging Catholic Palestinians. Residents once had a sweeping view of the city of Jerusalem but that has been ...
Caught Sherine Salama documentary yesterday called "The Last Days of Yasser Arafat". Too bad the Australian director, Salama wasn't able to be there. A few years ago, she screened her first documentary "A Wedding in Ramallah" at the festival and there was a lively discussion afterwards.
I'll be posting the remaining interview with Nancy Collet, programming director at the AFI, later today.
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“Paradise Now, which was featured at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, plays tonight at the University of California at Santa Barbara.Over the past few months, Hany Abu-Assad’s film, “Paradise Now” has been honored and excoriated simultaneously. While being nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category, winning several other awards, and enjoying critical acclaim, the controversial Palestinian film about the last 48 hours of two would-be suicide b...
