Palestinian Cinema Days Around The World Unveils Second Edition

deadline.com:

Ramallah-based Palestinian cinema body Filmlab Palestine has unveiled the second edition of its ‘Palestinian Cinema Days Around The World’ initiative comprising 253 screenings of eight Palestinian films in 44 countries and over 150 cities this weekend.

The line-up includes Julia Bacha’s 2017 documentary Naila And The Uprising, charting the journey of Palestinian rights activist Naila Ayesh against the backdrop of the First Intifada in the late 1980s; Khaled Jarrar’s 2013 Chicago Best Doc winner Infiltrators, following Palestinians navigating Israeli check points, and Abdallah Al Khatib’s Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege, capturing the siege of the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus during the Syrian War, which saw most of its 160,000 inhabitants flee.

Further titles include Micheal Winterbottom and Mohammad Sawwaf’s doc Eleven Days in May, commemorating 67 children who were killed over the course of 11 days in a previous flare up in the conflict in May 2021; Carol Mansour’s 2023 work Aida Returns, in which the Lebanese-Canadian-Palestinian director attempts to take her mother’s ashes back to her birth place of Yafa (Jaffa) which now lies in Israel, and Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan’s 2014 animated doc The Wanted 18 about the attempts of a Palestinian village to set up its own diary which was then deemed a security threat by Israel.

The initiative also showcases older titles, Resistance – Why by Christian Ghazi, featuring interviews in 1970 with politician and Men in the Sun and Return to Haifa author Ghassan Kanafani, Syrian intellectual Sadiq Jalal El-Azm and PLO figure Nabil Shaath, as well as Michel Khleifi’s 1984 doc Maloul Celebrates its Destruction about the former inhabitants of a Palestinian village