Boston Palestine Film Festival 2009

***DIRECTOR RASHID MASHARAWI RETROSPECTIVE – PART 3***

Gazan-born director Rashid Masharawi captures the absurdity of the Palestinian situation in this comically deadpan, stop-and-start “road trip” through the land of checkpoints and barriers. A former judge who still retains his regal bearing, Abu Laila (stone-faced Mohamed Bakri, a Palestinian Buster Keaton) now drives a taxi to make ends meet. His customers are a motley cross-section of Ramallah’s citizens: a young Romeo who hires the taxi to have a place “alone” with his lover; a housewife who’ll stop anywhere there’s a free-food giveaway, armed militia members and an ex-convict who leaves his cell phone in the cab. Our harried hero is also trying to regain his former position (his frequent trips to the Ministry of Justice are both comical and heartbreaking) and, today at least, he needs a birthday cake for his daughter. Using Abu Laila’s travails as a window into contemporary Palestine, Masharawi reveals a situation that is at once complicated and universally human. Most of all, he captures the surprising beauty of Ramallah.

Rashid Masharawi was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family of refugees from Jaffa. He grew up in the Shati refugee camp. Masharawi lives and works in Ramallah, where he founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Center in 1996 with the aim of promoting local film production. He also sponsors a mobile cinema, which allows him to screen films in Palestinian refugee camps. Other projects include the annual Kids Film Festival and major workshops on film production and directing. Masharawi regularly organizes readings and discussion forums at the Al-Matal Cultural Centre. With his documentaries and feature films, he has received several film awards.

Film Reviews: Phoenix

NY Times

Variety

Panel discussion following closing film LAILA's BIRTHDAY: Sunday November 1, 5:00 pm - Museum of Fine Arts
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Four panelists will be discussing the film Laila's Birthday with our audience in addition to giving us their thoughts on the status of Palestinian cinema, its prevailing themes and elements and its role as art and in the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Panelists:

Kamal Aljafari is a filmmaker and visual artist who graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. His films include the award-winning The Roof (2006), a quiet, personal testament to the history and daily oppression of Palestinians living in Israel and most recently Port of Memory (2009). He is the Benjamin White Whitney Scholar and Radcliffe-Harvard University Film Study Center Fellow for 2009-2010, and was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York.

Inez Hedges is Director of Cinema Studies and Professor of French, German, and Cinema Studies at Northeastern University. She recently taught a course on Palestinian and Israeli film. She is the author of several books, including Framing Faust: 20th Century Cultural Struggles and Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits.

Kamran Rastegar is assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature and director of the Arabic Language Program at the department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature at Tufts university. His areas of research are literary interactions between Arabic, Persian and English literatures, the representation of violence and social trauma in contemporary literature and visual culture, postcolonial theory and film studies of Arab and Iranian cinemas. He is the author of numerous publications and most notable is his book Literary Modernity Between the Middle East and Europe: Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, Persian and English Literatures (Routledge, 2007)

Nadia Yaqub is an associate professor of Arabic literature and culture in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the book Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: Oral Palestinian Poetry Dueling in the Galilee (Brill, 2006) as well as numerous articles on Arabic literature and Palestinian film and culture.