Palestine already exists on film

[grassfed]

While the second intifada (which started in September 2000) was still raging in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, the Nazareth-born filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002) was submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the nominated entry from Palestine for the best foreign language film Oscar category. The Academy rejected the film because, it said, “Palestine is not a country”. In 2006, when the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s film Paradise Now (2005) was nominated in the same category, the Academy accepted it, and identified its country as “the Palestinian Authority”.

The scholar Edward Said wrote in an introduction to a book about Palestinian cinema, Dreams of a Nation: “The whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.” This desire is what has driven the new wave of Palestinian films in the past decade. Palestinian cinema has reinvented itself many times over the past 40 years, but it’s the films made since the second intifada began in 2000 that have been getting international attention. Not because they exist, but because they make an unprecedented social, cultural and political statement.

Thousands of supporters of the Palestinian cause around the world – not just Palestinians – have picked up cameras over the past 10 years, helped by digital technology, to make films about Palestine and the continued plight of Palestinians today. Their cinema is characterised by its use of common historical and social facts to document the Palestinian struggle, Israeli occupation and cultural identity.

Leading scholars on Palestinian cinema, Nureth Gertz and Michel Khleifi, identified four distinct periods in their book Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. The first is between 1935 and 1948, the year of the nakba (or catastrophe, describing the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948). The second, “the epoch of silence”, was between 1948 and 1967, when no films were produced. The third encompasses the films of the revolutionary period between 1968 and 1982 – triggered by the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Day War – which were mostly made in exile in Lebanon by the PLO and other Palestinian organisations. The fourth period, which began in 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, continues to this day.

more http://mondediplo.com/2010/03/16palestinecinema