Following requests, below is the talk I gave at the opening of the 2012 Bristol Palestine Film Festival.
We’re living in
revolutionary and unstable times, full of promise and risk, energy, rupture and
antagonism. Citizens across the Middle East are demanding the building blocks
of fair and peaceful states: stability, freedom, justice; the integrity of
government; working national structures and infrastructures; independent, reliable
and efficient institutions; high quality national education and healthcare for
all; liberation from reactionary dogma, doctrine and dictatorship; opportunity, democracy, equality and liberty.
These issues are no less pertinent here today as we celebrate the culture and
resistance of Palestinians not only in Gaza and the West Bank but further out,
in the Palestinian diaspora.
Yet revolutions are
not defined by marches, protests, fighting and demonstrations alone. No
revolution is truly powerful unless it is also creative, uplifting, collective
and lasting; and the most profound revolutions affect every part of society. In
this way, we use all of the potential
of people – not only to resist and react, not only to challenge and confront,
not only to defend and fight but also to create, to transform and to promise a
better future for all. This year’s festival and its debates are more serious
and urgent that ever before, because of recent political and military events
[in Gaza]. However, the festival is not just about activism or political
identity but about the great wealth of creative talent which deserves to be
seen by the world and can in its turn shed light on life everywhere in the
world. Great art has universal application even though it comes from a specific
context.
At this year’s
festival you will find a great variety of film work from and about Palestine.
For those wishing to understand the reality of living in constant confrontation
with the army, the separation wall and the cruelty and daily caprice of
military occupation, combined with the concerted encroachment on and sabotage
of historic and valuable olive groves, there are three gritty, important and
unflinching films: The Colour of Olives (dir. Carolina Rivas and Daoud
Sarhandi), 5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi) and They Came in
the Morning, directed by Leila Sansour. Yet Palestinian film is not defined by
victimisation. In Yala to the Moon, directed by Suhel Nafar and Jacqueline Reem
Salloum, a woman recreates her world using the gifts of her imagination. And
Habibi, a wonderful film directed by Susan Youssef, is a Gaza-set story about
forbidden love, defiance, graffiti and urban love poetry. It won the Best Arab
Feature award at the 2011 8th Dubai International Film Festival and
the honour was richly deserved. Other films in the festival tackle universal
themes of human behaviour and of how we choose to react to events. In The
Choice, directed by Yasin Erik Bognar, a father and daughter in Ramallah express
grief in different ways. And in Sameh Zoabi’s comedy drama Man Without A
Cellphone, a cocky young playboy has to grow up and step up in the fight
against a nearby cellphone tower which might be leaking radiation.
These are just a
sample of the diversity of work being produced by Palestinian directors or
representing life in Palestine. Palestine is not just a ‘cause’ to be taken up,
a site of suffering or a fashionable issue in which people show ‘tremendous human
resilience, courage and spirit’ and are full of ‘warmth, humanity and
hospitality’ despite their ‘plight’. Palestine is not a racial or cultural
cliché to be explored and exploited, patronised and stereotyped, but a rich
society of individuals who love everything from film, art, performance and
literature to freedom, truth and justice ...which are all related and are for
everyone, by everyone, without prejudice.
