Editor’s Note: The following press release was by the Leeds Palestinian Film Festival. Mondoweiss occasionally publishes press releases and statements from organizations in an effort to draw attention to overlooked issues.
Leeds Palestinian Film Festival’s sixth edition will launch Saturday 14th November, 7pm and will be available for two weeks providing local, national and international audiences an even more accessible way to support and engage with Palestinian art, culture, history and politics through the medium of film.
Announcing fourteen films and three speaker events in their programme, Leeds Palestinian Film Festival will all be available to stream online, and worldwide for select films, between 14th and 28th November 2020. The ambition of the festival is to highlight outstanding films which focus on Palestine, changing one-dimensional views on the region. This includes documentaries, animations, features and short films made by established and emerging filmmakers from Palestine and across the globe.
Representatives from the Festival say:
“There is a tendency to equate Palestine only with conflict. Let us feed your curiosity and help you explore dimensions of it that you rarely get to see. A comedy drama about a wedding, the journey of puppeteer storytellers, women leading non-violent resistance, children’s stories in animation – just a few of the unexpected angles to discover in the varied films on offer. Don’t settle for a one-dimensional view of Palestine: the Festival is a unique opportunity to view it through a multitude of different eyes.”
Highlights from the festival’s speaker events include an interview with Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, to accompany two of her most recent films being shown at the festival Wajib and When I Saw You; an ‘In Conversation with…’ event discussing contemporary Arab cinema with Palestinian documentary filmmaker, and leader of London’s Radical Film School, Saeed Taji Farouky, and a panel discussion including US filmmaker and social-justice activist Dr. Alice Rothchild to accompany the UK Premiere of documentary Jews Step Forward.
Leeds Palestinian Film Festival is delighted to have received funding from Leeds City Councillors as well as generous donations from the public to their crowd-funding appeal. All other costs are met by ticket sales, with any profits going back into the Festival for the following year, and any additional proceeds being donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Tickets are available on a ‘Pay-What-You-Feel’ sliding scale, giving the audience the choice to donate based on income, number of expected viewers watching, and preferred contribution to the Festival and Medical Aid for Palestinians. Most films are accessible to audiences across the globe.
A Festival Pass is also available for UK audiences wishing to gain access to the entire film programme across the two week festival period. This is also priced on a donation based sliding scale and available to purchase for £25, £30 or £40.
Let me add two films that are relevant to the topic: https://www.docnyc.net/film/kings-of-capitol-hill/
Filmmaker Mor Loushy (Censored Voices) examines the powerful pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), known for bipartisan loyalty in Washington, DC. Throughout its 60-year history, AIPAC has thrived on maintaining order in its ranks, but Loushy gains interviews with disaffected insiders who have deep-seated reservations about the policy-making under Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump. Kings of Capitol Hill is an eye-opening look at how political influence can be won and lost.
https://www.metfilmsales.com/til-kingdom-come
Pastors encourage an impoverished Kentucky community, “The forgotten people of America”, to donate to Israel in anticipation of Jesus’s impending return. The film exposes the controversial bond between Evangelicals and Jews in a story of faith, power, and money, revealing how Trump’s America is led by an End-Times apocalyptic countdown.