Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad: “I want my films to put fear into Israelis. My job is to disturb their dreams, to wake them from the fantasy that there is no occupation.”
culture
Rapper Mic Righteous’s improvised set on BBC 1Xtra met with complaints after corporation masks the words ‘free Palestine’.
IOA Editor: What a sorry bunch running that ‘venerable institution’ called BBC.
Julian Schnabel’s Miral – Trailer. Stars Freida Pinto, Willam Dafoe, Hiam Abbass and Vanessa Redgrave. To the displeasure of Israeli officials, the full film was shown today at the UN headquarters in New York.
The Israeli army’s “looting” of books belonging to Palestinian intellectuals is the subject of a documentary being made by Dutch-Israeli film maker Benny Brunner. He claims as many as 30,000 Arabic books and manuscripts, some of them rare and valuable, ended up in Israel’s National Library after the 1948 war.
We are writing to you as a group of fellow filmmakers and academics, Palestinians, Israelis and others, to thank you for your principled and courageous step of withdrawing from the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School workshop and “implicitly” joining the cultural boycott of Israel… Your action is striking evidence of growing cultural resistance abroad to Israel’s intransigence. We hope it will encourage others. Only by such concerted action will the situation change in the Middle East.
A professor at Bethlehem University told me they refer to the [Bethlehem] checkpoint as “Lambs to the Slaughter,” and as I made my way through the metal chute towards the narrow turnstile, I did feel like a variety of livestock. In addition, the disembodied, garbled soldiers’ voices barking through loudspeakers gave the whole thing the aura of a dystopian science fiction novel.
