First Ever Houston Palestine Film Festival Draws Raves : Houston Indymedia

For the two middle weekends of May, the hottest ticket in Houston was the first annual Houston Palestine Film Festival (HPFF).

The idea of a festival promoting Palestinian identity and culture was hatched last summer by local Palestinian activist Hadeel Assali, who joined forces with Voices Breaking Boundaries and a team of Houston-based activists and film connoisseurs, headed by Hana El-Sahly and Iman Saqr, to pull off a surprisingly dynamic event. KPFT was instrumental in the smashing success of the fest’s debut by acting as a co-sponsor and by promoting the event on some of its most popular shows, including Arab Voices, Thresholds, Houston Indymedia, and The Progressive Forum.

The HPFF screened for the Houston community six feature length films—five documentaries and one fictional feature—and a number of experimental short pieces. The screenings stretched across six nights, divided over two weekends. The venues that hosted the film were Rice Media Center, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Station Museum, and FotoFest. The screenings were complemented with lively panel discussions that included film directors Lina Makboul, Nida Sinnokrot, and Elle Flanders, who traveled to Houston to be present at the screening of their respective films from their respective homes of Gothenburg, Sweden, Brooklyn, and Toronto. Also participating in the discussions were noted scholars As’ad AbuKhalil (known to KPFT listeners as ‘the Angry Arab’) and Houston’s own Ussama Makdisi. Every night of the event played to a packed house of attendees that stayed until the very end of the stimulating discussions.

The films included a touching and complicated modern portrait of Leila Khaled, who gained fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a hijacker, conducting operations to further the Palestinian cause; an experimental and daring film documenting the Israel security wall’s destruction of farm life in the Palestinian occupied West Bank; an absurdist comedy about an attempt to hire a Palestinian National Theater Company; and a documentary about the Byzantine legal obstacles faced by two Palestinian couples, each made up of a Palestinian from inside Israel and another living in exile, trying to unite and settle inside the borders of Israel. As a whole, the six feature length films and more than a dozen shorts painted a portrait of Palestinians in all their diverse, complicated, tragic, and inspiring humanity. The presence of the directors also proved enlightening, as their stories of their experiences making their films demonstrated that art itself is seen as a serious threat by those who oppose Palestinian self-determination. Nida Sinnokrot told an enraptured audience at the Station Museum of his experiences being beaten at Israeli checkpoints while his film was confiscated and his cameras broken. Lina Makboul was detained by Jordanian authorities while filming at the home of Leila Khaled, the former hijacker, and was only released through the intervention of a powerful family friend. She was stopped and questioned again by Northwest Airlines officials in Detroit while flying to Houston with copies of her film to attend the festival.

The Houston Palestine Film Festival plans to build on its inaugural success to become an annual event. For more information, go to http://www.vbbarts.org.