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)