FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Columbia University
Film festival from 2 - 6 February 2011

Dreams of a Nation:
A Palestinian Film Festival


The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University
will host a film festival from 2 - 6 February 2011

New York, NY, January 12, 2011 – The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University will host a film festival from 2 - 6 February 2011 that will celebrate the launch of the Dreams of a Nation Palestinian film archive. The film festival will launch with the New York premiere of Pomegranates and Myrrh, a film by Najwa Najjar, and include feature films and shorts by prominent Palestinian filmmakers from within Palestine and throughout the diaspora. The film festival is intended to celebrate the nationhood and collective identity of the Palestinians, both in their unity and their fragmentation. Films featured in the four day festival include: Wedding in Galilee (Michel Khleifi), The Roof (Kamal Al-Jafari), Salt of this Sea (Annemarie Jacir), The Time that Remains (Elia Suleiman), Since You Left (Mohammad Bakri), and The Land Speaks Arabic (Maryse Gargour). Palestinian short films Happy Days and Space Exodus (Larissa Sansour), Be Quiet (Sameh Zoabi), End of September (Sama AlShaibi and Ala’ Yunis) are also featured. Najwa Najjar and Hiam Abbas will be attending the screening of Pomegranates and Myrrh and Elia Suleiman will attend the screening of The Time That Remains.

The festival will also include an academic panel on “Exploring Identity and Social History Through a Palestinian Lens” and culminate with a cultural night of poetry and spoken word, traditional folkloric dance (dabke) and Palestinian food.

Palestinian cinema provides a visual articulation of the Palestinian experience, asserting collective identity and resisting an imposed (non)identity on the Palestinian national narrative. Through film, Palestinians are able to express their plight while giving a human face to the Palestinian people, who are often vilified in mainstream media. According to Richard Pena, of the New York Film Society: “The most impressive source of cinematic creativity in the Arab world right now is the emerging generation of Palestinian filmmakers.”

Archiving Palestinian national cinema is part of an ongoing project to document, preserve and maintain the Palestinian struggle for self-representation. The Dreams of a Nation Palestinian film archive makes available biographies of filmmakers, synopses of films and will provide a library of critical writings on Palestinian film.

Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Festival aspires to remember and celebrate everyday life for Palestinians around the world. The festival is sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies and the School of Arts at Columbia University. For more information about the Center for Palestine Studies and for the full festival program please visit, www.columbia.edu/cu/palestine <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/palestine>


Contact Information: rmw2127@columbia.edu