This week on the podcast, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Kaleem (who’s also a Film Comment contributor) to discuss our recent home-viewing—which, as it turned out, included a lot of Palestinian cinema. From the agitprop of Mustafa Abu Ali’s 1974 film They Do Not Exist, to the diasporic longing of Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza (2013), to the biting satire and media criticism of Elia Suleiman, the conversation covered a lot of fascinating ground. See below for links to the movies.
Links & Things: Kaleem Hawa on the history of the Palestine Film Unit in The New York Review of Books “Palestine Censored,” a series curated by Kaleem for This Light Actually The Palestine Film Institute They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974) Films by Basma Alsharif, Larissa Sansour, and others streaming for free in Another Screen’s For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women series Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976) Introduction to the End of an Argument (Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum, 1990) An Unusual Summer (Kamal Aljafari, 2020) Arab American National Musuem’s free virtual Elia Suleiman retrospective and talkback An interview with Basma Alsharif in BOMB Magazine