Boston Palestine Film Festival 2008

Palestinian filmmaker Osama Qashoo travels to Cuba and discovers that Havana has it’s own version of Palestinians. ‘Palestino’ is a racist term used in Cuba for poor black migrants coming from the east. Qashoo befriends a homeless “palestino” named Luisito, a clown-singer-musician who lives in a wooden box. Luisito had not been home for seven years, so he and Qashoo set off to meet his family on a musical-comedy journey into the politics of today’s Cuba. Osama Qashoo began filming when he was in his early twenties in reaction to the events of the Second Intifada. After being given a broken camera from a friend, Qashoo discovered that when he pretended to film street demonstrations and military-enforced curfews, the Israeli soldiers reacted. This experience that led him to believe that filmmaking was a powerful medium for protecting human rights and bringing Palestine to an international audience. He graduated from the National Film in Television School in England in 2005, and has screened his work throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Co-presented with the Boston Latino International Film Festival (BLIFF)

Tale of the Three Jewels is a moving parable and the first feature film ever to be filmed in the Gaza Strip. Made in the days following the Hebron Massacre, it tells the story of Yussef, a twelve-year-old boy who escapes the surrounding violence by retreating into an imaginary world of his own creation. One day he meets Aida, a gypsy girl with whom he falls in love. When Yussef declares his desire to marry her, she tells him that he must first find three missing jewels. An Official Selection of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, the 1997 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Michel Khleifi was born in Nazareth in 1950. In 1970 he traveled to Belgium where he studied television and theater directing. His films include: Fertile Memory (1980), Ma'loul Celebrates its Destruction (1985), Wedding in Galilee (1987 - International Critics Prize, Cannes 1987), Canticle of the Stones (1990), L'Ordre du Jour (1993), and Tale of the Three Jewels (1995). Tale of the Three Jewels is the first feature film ever to be filmed in the Gaza Strip. It was made in the days following the Hebron Massacre and before the arrival of the Palestinian Authority. The Michel Khleifi program was made possible by the participation of the Program in Cinema Studies at Northeastern University.