The Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF)

Co-presented with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
October 19–28, 2018

Beginning with opening night’s Reports on Sarah and Saleem (dir. Muayad Alayan), which includes an after party with filmgoers, directors, organizers, music, and dancing, this year’s Boston Palestine Film Festival offers an amazing range of award-winning films on the pressing subject of human rights. For the full program visit bostonpalestinefilmfest.org.

The overriding message that comes through the documentaries, shorts, and features in this year’s Palestine Film Festival is the power of “nationality.” The films delve into the psychology of nationhood and the nearly insurmountable plight of displaced people who essentially don’t “exist” if they aren’t citizens of an extant nation. Many live for generations in refugee camps devoid of average employment opportunities and basic social services.

Another nugget in this program is the film art of the shorts in particular. It’s mind-boggling to experience a complete statement, a perfect story, in five to twenty-five minutes through a visual medium. The shorts don’t rely on dialogue but on interior emotions conveyed by the protagonists’ faces, enhanced by the creative film techniques and sound.

The “Shorts II” series screens October 28 and focuses on the immigrant experience. Again, it’s the emotions of the central characters in these six films that tell a gripping, usually unfathomable story for American audiences, or those who aren’t recent immigrants themselves. In only 14 tension-filled minutes, we absorb the young woman Salam (Hana Chamoun), a Syrian immigrant in New York, earning a living as a Lyft driver. With only a few lines of dialogue, we understand that she lives with her brother Rashad’s family but her fiancé Musel is stuck in Syria and is now in the hospital with serious head wounds as a result of the war. Much of the movie involves a Lyft ride with Salam’s opposite: a young, blond American woman named Audrey who has little worry about money but serious problems in her relationship. During the course of the women’s entire night’s drive—Upstate and back—they bond, but only as sympathetic women, for their deeper feelings are “too complicated,” they say, to share. They mean “too painful” for words. Audrey returns to her dreary love life while Salam overflows with joy when she receives a call from Musel—alive! We understand like never before the value of a human life. (Actress Hana Chamoun attends the MFA screening of Salam on October 28.)

All of the festival’s shorts drive home the meaning of families and of missing or losing a loved one. In Rupture (dir. Yassmina Karajah), we spend a few hours (18-minutes film time) with teenage siblings, Salim and Leila, newly arrived Syrians to a peaceful, middle-class Vancouver suburb. Wearing a headset, Salim listens to an English pronunciation lesson. In another room, his younger sister’s headset plays music, their faces showing their different personalities: he’s ultra-serious and she’s lively. Salim overhears his mother on the phone in the kitchen. She’s hysterical over the news that her eldest child Hany has been shot and is in the hospital: “We should never have left him there! He’s my son! Send us a photo of him! I want my boy!” The trauma rocks through the house, through Salim’s stunned face, and through us, the audience.

The rest of the day goes on with Salim in a distracted state that tells all when he looks at Hany’s photo on his phone. What is it like to get the news that your older brother has been shot because of a senseless war and may be dying too far away to reach, to see, to hold the hand of? Or your son? Salim and Leila’s faces show us what it’s like. We don’t need, and don’t receive, much dialogue—it’s not necessary. Watching these children, we experience how the most painful emotions are always wordless. The only consolation, which barely touches the grief, is the physical and psychological presence of another family member, in this case brother and sister.

Catherine Prowse and Hannah Quinn’s Laymun tells an entire world in five animated minutes. Colors in this war-torn village are muted, life sucked out of them. Surviving townsfolk huddle together while a soundtrack drops bombs. A woman delivers the only living green thing to a neighbor’s doorstep—a lemon tree seedling. It feels as if the home has just experienced a death and the plant pays community respect. Lemon trees also symbolize healing: the cleansing and restoring of the mind, body, and spirit.

With a shift to guitar music we are in the woman’s greenhouse where she cultivates lots of lemon seedlings as if to propagate life and goodness to serve as a counterforce to the violence and destruction. She looks at a picture of herself with a man, presumably lost to her in the war. A bomb shatters the greenhouse. The next day, the villagers are on a bus being evacuated. The woman takes a last surviving lemon from her bag and gives it to a young girl. It glows like the girl’s smile and symbolizes hope for the girl’s future. In a mostly brown movie, the bright yellow lemon is a seedling for the life that inhumanity has nearly obliterated.

These are just a few of the visually and intellectually outstanding short films screening at the festival. The longer documentary Soufra (dir. Thomas Morgan) is a triumphal story about enterprising women in Beirut’s Bourj el-Barjneh refugee camp. Johny Karam’s photography of fresh food preparation, laughing cooks’ faces, and abundant, sizzling and succulent Middle Eastern cuisine brings color, vivacity, and the good things in life to a movie about families devoid of hope for viable employment and a future for their kids.

Palestinian Mariam Shaar was born in the camp, which began in 1948. Her childhood dreams for a good education and fulfilling career ended when she had to drop out of school to support the family. In the film, she wants to do something about the camp’s dire situation. She tells us that in Lebanon, doors to refugees have always remained open, but once settled in a camp, there’s almost no chance of upward mobility. Laws prevent renting housing outside the camp, and generally those without a “nationality,” such as Palestinians, face employment and social restrictions. Their situation feels synonymous with nonexistence.

Mariam starts Soufra, a high-quality catering business run by women that ultimately succeeds outside the camp’s boundaries, promising hope for some families for the future, and also setting a precedent for more entrepreneurial initiatives that contribute to Lebanon’s economy and ethnic integration. The legal road to Mariam’s goal is arduous, and the film travels with each of her steps to achievement—registering a business, getting licenses and work permits, and buying a food truck. Throughout the movie, Alexander Seaver’s music is light, gentle, and hopeful, and embodies the unwavering strength of the working women. Over the months, the project offers them more than financial stability; it changes their lives and how they feel about themselves: “You realize your worth,” one of the cooks says. “What we’re doing benefits ourselves, not just our families. We learn something new every day. We get out, meet people, see different places. Women can do anything, especially in these times.” The women’s men are glad for the help that contributes to a better home life. “And she’s happy, she likes her crew,” one husband says. The women come from different backgrounds—Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese—and learn about each other’s food, traditions, and personal lives. It’s a warm and supportive “women-for-women” enclave. One cook informs us: “I tell my daughters not to rely on anyone.”

 

Soufra means a big fancy table with a variety of delicious foods.

Mariam concludes the film with her persevering and positive energy: “We hope for a better life in the future. I hope refugees stop being associated with security threats. Terrorism has no nationality. There is the good and the bad everywhere. I hope that the children, who are the pillars of the future, live a healthy life, to be beneficial to others.”

May Mariam’s initiative and success speak to the whole world.