Fourth Annual DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival: October 2-5, 2014

Fourth Annual DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival: October 2-5, 2014

Fourth Annual DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival: October 2-5, 2014

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Arab Studies Institute is happy to announce it`s sponsorship of the 2014
DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS 

2014 Program of Films and Events:
  
Thursday October 2, 2014:

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Stories for Justice: Visualizing Palestine Exhibit and Opening Reception 

Join us for the opening reception of the fourth annual DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival, featuring the work of Vizualizing Palestine. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel, otherwise known as infographics. It has produced infographics on the…Read more

6:30pm-9:30pm @ Emergence Community Arts Collective 
(733 Euclid St. NW Washington, DC 20001)
Light fare and drinks served.
 

Friday October 3, 2014

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Condom Lead and Gaza 36 mm 

“Cast Lead,” the name of the 2009 offensive against the Gaza Strip, alone tells of its brutality. So does the siege’s duration: 22 continuous days. Terror and despair, the universal reaction to conflict situations, seize the population. Unable to move, people are plunged into an unbearable oppression of forced resignation. Caught in the net of such brutality…Read more 

7-8pm @ Goethe Institut | 52 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)
 

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A World Not Ours 

An intimate, humorous portrait of three generations in exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive and illuminating study of belonging…Read More

8:30pm @ Goethe Institut | 93 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001) 
 

Saturday October 4, 2014:

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Cinema Palestine

CINEMA PALESTINE is feature length documentary that explores the life and work of multiple generations of Palestinian filmmakers and media artists. Told through intimate, in-depth interviews with a wide range of Palestinian artists living in the…Read more 

1pm @Goethe Institut | 79 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)

  
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Spotlight on Gaza with Leila El-Haddad, Author of The Gaza Kitchen featuring acclaimed short Condom Lead by Tarazan and Arab Nasser

Laila El-Haddad, author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between and co-author of The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, is a talented blogger, political analyst, social activist, and parent-of-three from Gaza City. She is also…Read more

2:30-3:45pm @Goethe Institut
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)

 
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Where Should the Birds Fly

The first film about Gaza made by Palestinians living the reality of Israel’s siege and blockade of this tiny enclave. It is the story of two young women, survivors of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Mona Samouni, now 12 years old and the filmmaker, Fida Qishta, now 27, represent the spirit and future of Palestinians…Read more 

4pm @Goethe Institut | 58 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)

 

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Omar

Omar climbs over a separation wall and through bullets for Nadia’s love. He is a thoughtful boy and a focused baker. He lands on the other side a resistance fighter who faces choices about how to be a man. The occupied West Bank knows neither simple love nor clear war. Who’s an enemy depends on circumstance…Read more 

5:30 @Goethe Institut | 96 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)
 

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Huda Asfour Quartet presents Mosaic

Mosaic, reflects Huda’s multi-faceted musical and life experiences. Its songs aim at reviving the different musical legacies that have helped shape the personality and music repertoire of Huda Asfour, ranging the folk songs of Iraq to Tunisia, to original compositions exploring the theme of love. In Mosaic, Huda blends vocals…Read more 

8pm @Goethe Institut
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)

 
Sunday October 5, 2014: 

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May in the Summer

May has it all—a celebrated book, a sophisticated New York life, and a terrific fiancé to match. But when she heads to Amman, Jordan, to arrange her wedding, she lands in a bedlam of family chaos she thought she’d transcended long before. Her headstrong, born-again Christian mother so disapproves of her marrying…Read More

2:30 @Goethe Institut | 100 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)
 

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Between Two Lovers: Palestinian Art between Old & New: women artist panel featuring photographer Laila Jadallah and Tamara Essayyad of Ibra wa Khayt, interviewed by Nehad Khader. With short films Horizon and Yalla to the Moon. 

Tamara Essayad is one of the women behind Ibra wa Khayt, a project that brings together the old and the new, inspired by the feisty women of the creators’ families and the dusty sewing machines…Read more

4:30-6pm @Goethe Institut
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)
 

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Suspended Time (shorts collection) 

In the article “The Day After,” Edward Said provided an immediate and very sombre reading of the Oslo Agreement signed in September 1993. He begins with the reading of the theatrics of the signing ceremony itself, and moves on to declare that the entire agreement is the suspension of most of Palestinians’ rights. After…Read more

6:30 @Goethe Institut | 67 mins
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)

 

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Lena Seikaly & Band, Closing Reception 

Lena is a fresh voice on the national jazz scene from Washington, D.C. Dubbed as “one of Washington’s preeminent jazz singers” and “brightest voices in jazz” (The Washington Post), as well as a “major league young talent in jazz” by Duke Ellington’s biographer, Dr. John Hasse, Lena is already making her mark as both a revivalist of traditional jazz vocals, as well as an innovator in contemporary vocal jazz styles.

8-9pm @Goethe Institut
(812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001)


About:
 
The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival (DC-PFAF) is a not for profit, volunteer run annual project. It is in its fourth year and aims to showcase the work of Palestinian filmmakers and artists for audiences in Washington, DC and its surrounding areas. It is a unique festival in that the stories told through this project are not necessarily about the Palestinian/Israel conflict, nor are they necessarily stories about Palestinians, but they are stories that reflect the dynamic formation of a transnational identity common to Palestinians and diasporic communities more generally. In Washington, DC, a city filled with communities from around the world, and a city where political decisions are made, we have seen that there is indeed an interested audience for such a project.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412