28 April 2011
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.
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.
