Movie Review: Canada Palestine Film Festival

“Israeli films in Palestinian festival” by Randall King (Winnipeg Free Press, Sept. 24, 2004, page D8)

Before a single frame was projected, the national Jewish organization B'nai Brith denounced this three-day festival of films, not only because it is “one-sided” (a dubious claim from B'nai Brith spokeswoman Karen Lazar, who had apparently not seen any of the films) but ostensibly because it was programmed to run at the 110-seat downtown theatre at the same time as the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

Organizer Paul Burrows said the timing was unintentional, and this is credible given the normal ebb and flow of traveling film festivals across the continent.

If anything, the criticism seems especially persnickety.   Would the programmers of a Jewish film festival care one way or another if screenings were held during the Muslim holy days of Ramadan?   Should they care?

This display of bluster, accompanied by B'nai Brith's request for “additional security measures to be put in place to ensure the safety of the Jewish community” proves, if anything, the polarizing dynamics of the issues raised in the festival films.

Yet some of the films may offer the promise of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.   Two of the films in the program, the documentaries Arna's Children and The Bombing are by Israeli filmmakers.

The “Arna” of Arna's Children is, in fact, Jewish.   Arna Mer was a former member of Israel's Palmakh fighters of the Israel Defense Forces, before she joined the Communist Party and married a Palestinian party member.

Her son Juliano Mer Khamis co-directed this documentary for Dutch television, set in the embattled Palestinian city of Jenin over a period of approximately 14 years.    Juliano, an actor, helps his mother run a theatre program for Palestinian children, who grow to love Arna, as one affirms, “like my mother.”

The film may have started out as a loving portrait of Arna and her efforts to channel the anger of her students – one of whom is seen in an apparent state of shock, squatting beside the ruins of his bombed-out home – into creative endeavors.

But the documentary's true focus – and its poignancy – comes from the fact that these laughing, playful kids transform, over the course of a decade, into suicide bombers, resistance fighters, and “martyrs” to their cause.

Their journey to violence would be demoralizing about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, if not for the presence of Arna herself, who succumbed to cancer in 1998, but whose indomitable spirit offers a sense of hope in the face of this crushing historical antagonism.

Arna's Children screens Saturday at 7 p.m. with the documentary short The Lobby , an inquiry into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Also showing at the festival:

• Rana's Wedding

A single frenzied day in the life of a 17-year old Palestinian woman who awakens one morning to an ultimatum: Either choose a husband from a pre-selected list of eligible men, or join her father in Egypt and continue her college education.   Tonigh at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 9 p.m.

• Dispatches: The Killing Zone / Jenin, Jenin

Two hour-long documentaries.   The Killing Zone (2003) documents the lives of ordinary Palestinians contending with lives of daily violence in the Gaza Strip.   Jenin, Jenin , once banned in Israel, delves further into the Palestinian city under siege.   Tonight at 9 p.m.

• ROUTE 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel

The first of a three-part, 270-minute documentary in which Palestinian director Michel Khleifi and Israeli director Eyal Sivan travel from the south to the north of the tiny Middle Eastern country.   Parts two and three screen Sunday, Sept. 26 at 2 p.m.

• The Bombing / Frontiers of Dreams and Fears

Two hour-long documentaries.   The Bombing examines the aftermath of a 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem, including interviews with the bomber's family, and the families of his teenage victims, and the meeting of those two parties.   Frontiers is an examination of the relationship between two teen girls, one in Lebanon and the other in the West Bank.   Sunday, Sept. 26 at 7 p.m.

E-mail: randall.king@freepress.mb.ca