London Palestine Film Festival opens tomorrow!

The 2011 London Palestine Flim Festival will open tomorrow, Friday, 29 April and will run through 11 May.

The opening night will feature Zindeeq to be followed by a q & a with director Michel Khleifi and producer Omar Al-Qattan, chaired by Karma Nabulsi.

The film festival will also faeture the UK premier of The Kingdom of Women by Dahna Aburahme, who was interviewed by Amany Al-Sayyed for The Electronic Intifada last year.

Other films featured in the festival are American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein, Rachel by Simone Bitton, documentaries and shorts by Palestinian filmmakers, four works that according to EI reviewer Naira Antoun, “typify the breadth of the [festival] program”: Mahmoud al-Massad’s This is my Picture When I was Dead, Shane O’Sullivan’s Children of the Revolution, Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves and Far from Vietnam by a group of French filmmakers.

See the full schedule here.

In other film festival news, the Chicago Palestine Film Festival closed its 10th annual festival with a sold-out screening of Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, which Ali Abunimah declared a “masterpiece” — a description with which I can only agree. (Suleiman was interviewed by Sabah Haider for The Electronic Intifada in 2010.)

There are now Palestine film festivals in Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, Toronto and elsewhere — it’s an exciting time for Palestinian cinema and film about Palestine.