One of the sections of the festival focuses each year on a geographical area we would like to understand more about, through the stories of the people who live there. For the current edition we have prepared the “Focus: Israel and Palestine” section, dedicated to filmmakers Avi Mograbi and Michel Khleifi.
THE AVI MOGRABI RETROSPECTIVE
One of the most compelling and original filmmakers of our times, Avi Mograbi is one of our special guests for this year’s festival edition. Having made in the past few decades a series of films that are difficult to classify, in which political discourse and a documentary-style approach are often intertwined with unexpected aesthetic formulas that not only give nuance to his chosen themes, but also approach them from surprising angles, Mograbi is certainly an iconoclast.
Those aspects of Israeli society that the filmmaker is interested in are at the same time specific and universal. They are specific because they depict the different ways in which Israelis think of the Palestinian population, the most frequent manifestation of their behaviour being that of aggressiveness and superiority. And they are universal because what underlies all these abusive relationships are mechanisms recognisable in every nation, all crystallised around a set of collective myths and beliefs meant to bestow on them a sense of uniqueness and ascendancy above all others.
Mograbi’s cinematic style is marked by a sarcastic humour, often painful to watch due to the fact that he won’t necessarily offer any pathways towards overcoming the ideological and political deadlock which seems to engulf the Israel of his films. His bitter observations are like those of a buffoon, much too lucid to turn a blind eye to the realities around him, but at the same time too passionate about life, in all its aspects, not to sing its praise. From this seemingly paradoxical temperamental clash hails a spectacular and spectacle-like outlook of society and of the people who make it up, greatly enhanced by Mograbi’s performative flair as protagonist in all his films.
The retrospective we dedicate to Avi Mograbi will be screening four fantastic documentaries he has mae between 2002 and 2016: August: A Moment Before the Eruption (2002), Avenge But One Of My Two Eyes (2005), Z32 (2008) and Between Fences (2016). After each screening, Avi Mograbi will be present in the room so as to have a larger discussion with the audience.
MICHEL KHLEIFI RETROSPECTIVE
Michel Khleifi is a very unique kind of filmmaker, a brilliant translator of what is hidden in the most remote parts of our souls. He is a poet.
Born in Nazareth in the 1950s, he goes on to study cinema in Brussels, then returns to film his country like no one else had ever done before, with his deeply personal way of using the cinematic tools, both fiction and documentary, in a very poetic manner - a lyricism that in his films acts as a magical key to open the doors to reality.
Most of his films question Palestinian society, Palestinian culture and the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Everyone can relate to Michel Khleifi’s searches over the past 40 years of creation, no matter where they come from and no matter their background. With him, we have the feeling of experiencing for ourselves the dispossession and the exile of all those whose identities are in danger. With him, we discover the diversity of the Palestinian people through their daily lives, we discover how their land is becoming increasingly fragmented, we feel the double restrictions imposed on women by the patriarchal Palestinian society under Israeli occupation, we witness political and social transformations. With him, we touch a sore point in a very beautiful and complex way, never voyeuristic or tear-jerking.
The retrospective we dedicate to Michel Khleifi will be screening three of his documentaries made between 1980 and 2004: Fertile Memory (1980), Canticle of the Stones (1990) and Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (2004, made in collaboration with Eyal Sivan).
FOCUS
In the Focus on Israel and Palestine category we try to break prejudice through filmmakers and their characters. One such documentary is “Samouni Road”, by Stefano Savona.
The story recounted in this film has widely been publicised as “The Zeitoun incident” and took place in January 2009 in a rural suburbia of the city of Gaza in Palestine, where, over the course of one night, 48 civilians were killed in an Israeli attack. The Samouni family, who we will be following throughout Stefano Savona’s film, lost 29 of its members that night, among which men, women and children. However, the director manages to steer us away from this blind massacre and the land devastations — scenes we see everyday in the media. Through his matter-of-fact approach towards the Samounis, his unsentimental style of filming and illustrating what they went through, we meet an ordinary and peace-loving Palestinian family, a family of farmers trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of suffering a major trauma.
