Cinematic Dialogs
This series presents a monthly conversation around current topics of Palestinian film culture and its politics. Each episode will be streamed live here on the PFI facebook page.
Episode 12 - Batool Elhennawy & Razan AlSalah
For Episode 12 of our Cinematic Dialogs series, programmer Batool Elhennawy speaks with director Razan AlSalah about her film work, including A Stone’s Throw (2024).
Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. Her moving images are both ghostly trespasses and seeping ruptures of the colonial image, that functions as another border, another wall. She thnks of her creative process as a collective recollection in a circle of relations with each other -and the unknown. Her films have screened at Cinema Days Palestine (Sunbird Award for Best Short 2017), RIDM (Best National Short or Medium Length Film 2024), Singapore, Yebisu, Valdivia, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Gabes Cinema Fen, Prismatic Ground, Blackstar, doc Lisboa, FID Marseille, Open City Docs, Instants Video, among others.
Batool Elhennawy is an artist and cultural programmer. She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University. She worked with the Cairo Institute for Arts and Sciences in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as doing research for art and culture institutions and projects. She participated in Spring Sessions residency (2017), The Lab Residency (2019) at Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan, and Arriving Elsewhere (2019) in Wadi Rum, Jordan, PS: Communitism (2023) in Athens, where she developed and exhibited work, and co-curated After Hours residency (2020) at Darat al Funun. She is currently working as a programmer at Contemporary Image Collective (CIC). Her practice revolves around working with theory to find starting points for projects that might take on other forms, with a focus on text, and (moving) image.
Episode 11 - Abdallah Al-Khatib & Ziad Kalthoum
For Episode 11 of our Cinematic Dialogs series, directors Abdallah Al-Khatib and Ziad Kalthoum speak with one another about their film practices, and the state of cinema production in Syria today.
Abdallah Al Khatib was born in Damascus in 1989 and currently resides in Germany. A director, writer, and human rights defender, he identifies as Palestinian-Syrian. He studied sociology at the University of Damascus and is currently continuing his studies in Germany. Al Khatib was named Peacemaker of the Year in 2014 by German Greenpeace and won the Swedish Per Anger Prize for Human Rights in 2016. His award-winning debut documentary, Little Palestine—Diary of a Siege (2021), was selected for several festivals, including Visions du Réel and the Acid program at the Festival de Cannes. In 2023, he began working in fiction with his short film Sokrania 59.
Ziad Kalthoum is a Syrian filmmaker currently living in Berlin. He was born in Homs in 1981. In 2012, during the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, he began working on his first feature film The Immortal Sergeant while serving a compulsory military service. The film had its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014. In 2015, he won the BBC Arabic Festival in the ‘Best Feature Documentary’ category.
Refusing to fight his own people, he deserted from the Syrian Army in 2013 and fled to Beirut where he started to work on Taste of Cement. The film has been traveling to festivals around the world and has won various awards, among them the Golden Sesterce for Best Feature Documentary at Visions du Réel in 2017.
Episode 10 - Heiny Srour & Rasha Salti
For Episode 10 of our Cinematic Dialogs series, writer and curator Rasha Salti will speak with director Heiny Srour about her cinematic work, and the recent restoration and re-release of her seminal feature Leila and the Wolves (1984).
Heiny Srour is a film director from Lebanon. Born in 1945, Heiny first studied Social Anthropology in Paris and later worked as a journalist and film critic. Her areas of focus include Third World cinema and the role of women in revolutionary struggle, often leading her to make films under dangerous circumstances. She is a pioneer of women’s cinema, and was the first Arab woman to have a film chosen for the Cannes Film Festival, with The Hour of Liberation has Arrived in 1974.
Rasha Salti is an independent writer and curator of art and film. She lives and works between Beirut and Berlin. Salti co-curated many film programs at public institutions, including ArteEast, Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and collaborated with film festivals as a programmer, such as the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. Since 2017, she is the commissioning editor for La Lucarne at ArteFrance, a program dedicated to Auteur documentaries.
Episode 9 - Azza El Hassan & Mohanad Yaqubi
For Episode 9 of our Cinematic Dialogs series, directors Azza El Hassan and Mohanad Yaqubi discuss the intersection of militant cinema and archival practice in the documentary field. This conversation was streamed live on the Palestine Film Institute Facebook page on Sunday July 24th at 7pm.
Azza El Hassan is a filmmaker and the winner of various international film awards such as, The Aleph Documentary Award, Luchino Visconti Award, Jazeera Jury Award and the prestigious Grierson Award. Azza has a special interest in the use of visual archive, in films, by nations who’s archive has been destroyed or abducted. In 2019, she founded The Void Project, a multi media art project, that aims to restore archival films, curate exhibitions and produce narratives that centres around archive and the effect of their abduction on narratives.
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production house Idioms Film. He is the director of the archival films Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victor (2016) and Tokyo Reels AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022) . With Reem Shilleh, he founded Subversive Film in 2011, a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices. He is also a researcher at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Gent.
Episode 8 - Dima Hamdan & Saeed Taji Farouky
For Episode 8 in the Cinematic Dialogs series, we have the pleasure of welcoming directors Dima Hamdan and Saeed Taji Farouky for a conversation about identity and home, film practice at a distance, and the tradition of cinema in exile.
Dima Hamdan is a Palestinian journalist and filmmakers. After spending ten years working with the BBC Arabic & World Service, the stories she covered during that time inspired many ideas for her short films and feature projects. She has directed five shorts since 2007 in London, Amman and Berlin. Her latest short film, The Bomb, won the Best Female Director of the 2019 Ayodhya Film Festival in India, and received a Special Mention at the Festival del Cinema dei Diritti Umani di Napoli.
Saeed Taji Farouky is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and artist specializing in long-term human rights projects. His documentary Tell Spring Not to Come This Year won the Amnesty International Award and the Audience Choice Panorama Award at Berlinale 2015. In 2011, he was named a Senior TED Fellow, and he was previously named Artist-In-Residence at the British Museum and Tate Britain. Most recently, his documentary A Thousand Fires won the Marco Zucchi Award in the Semaine de la Critique at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival. He has been a regular human rights speaker and educator with Amnesty International for 10 years and has been teaching filmmaking and cinematography since 2009.
Episode 7 - Lina Soualem & Hiam Abbass
Our Cinematic Dialogs return with an exchange between actor/directors Lina Soualem and Hiam Abbass, exploring themes of identity and home in their film practices.
Lina Soualem is a French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actress, born and based in Paris. In 2019, she released her debut feature documentary Their Algeria. These past years, Lina acted in three feature films directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass and Rayhana. She is currently developing her second feature documentary, and works as an author and assistant director on fiction films, documentaries and TV series.
Hiam Abbass is a pioneering Palestinian actress and director. She is known for her roles in films such as Satin Rouge (2002), Haifa (1996), Paradise Now (2005), The Syrian Bride (2004), Free Zone (2005), Dawn of the World (2008), The Visitor (2008), Lemon Tree (2008), and Amreeka (2009). In 2012 her directorial debut, The Inheritance, debuted at the Venice Film Festival. Her influence and profile has continued to grow in recent years, through rolls in hit television shows like Ramy (2019-present) and Succession (2018-present).
Episode 6 - Ameer Fakher Eldin & Ashraf Barhoum
The sixth instalment in the Cinematic Dialogs series, Director Ameer Fakher Eldin and Actor Ashraf Barhoum reflect together on Fakher Eldin's new film The Stranger, set in the occupied Golan Heights.
Episode 5 - Lubna Taha, Christian Mouroux & Geraldo Adriano Campos
Episode 4 - Cherien Dabis & Noura Erakat
Our Cinematic Dialog for this month will feature two pioneering Palestinian women, each a leader in their respective fields. Activist, professor, legal scholar & human rights attorney Noura Erakat will be in a dialogue with director, writer and actress Cherien Dabis. Together, they will discuss the challenges of narrating our story in cinemas, and their complimentary approaches to that task.
Episode 3 - Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan
Michel Khleifi is a Palestinian filmmaker from Nazareth, whose pioneering films helped shape the trajectory of Palestine’s cinema. His debut Fertile Memory (1980) was the first feature to be shot in the West Bank, and his seminal Wedding in Galilee was awarded the International Critics Prize at Cannes Film Festival in 1987. Since 1970 he has lived in Belgium, and has taught filmmaking at the Institute National superior des arts du spectacle (INSAS) in Brussels. His heterodox approach has produced a remarkable filmography of documentary and fiction works, exploring often unexpected elements within the multiplicity of Palestinian experiences.
Eyal Sivan is a documentary filmmaker and theoretician based in France. Born in 1964 in Haifa, he was raised in Jerusalem, and settled in Paris in 1985. An iconoclast among documentarians from Israel and known for his controversial films, he has directed more than 10 renowned political documentaries, including Izkor (1990), The Specialist (1999), and Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork (2009). He is the founder and artistic director of the Paris based production company memento!, and recently co-authored the book ‘Un boycott légitime: Pour le BDS universitaire et culturel de l'État d'Israël.’
Episode 2 - Stefano Savona
In episode 2, director Stefano Savona of Samouni Road (2018) speaks with Mohamed Jabaly, director of Ambulance (2017) about the challenges of documenting Gaza and making a cinematic image of a cruel reality, while dealing with a film Industry that still promotes, to a large extent, the settler colonial narrative, not only toward Palestine, but toward all struggles.
Episode 1 - Hady Zaccak
