‘PALESTINE WITH LOVE’

The “Palestine with love” festival, from June 3rd until June 10th, will celebrate this beautiful and powerful cinema of resistance by showing films and documentaries that have marked Palestine cinema and have contributed in making sure that Palestine, today, is still the issue.

1948. The birth of the State of Israel for some, the beginning of the slow erasure of Palestine for others.

Whichever side you are on, it marked the beginning of a new era in the Middle East and meant for most Palestinians the start of the biggest struggle of their life. A struggle to exist and to be heard, a struggle for self-determination.

« Artists are the ones who guide us towards the future, they are the ones who allow us to experience what we are not yet able to conceptually articulate, they are the ones who allow us to imagine the possibilities of a better world. » once said Angela Davis, and this statement has never been truer than when it comes to Palestine. Film makers from all around historical Palestine have been at the forefront of this struggle to show what the reality in Palestine is, to re-humanise the Palestinian People, while most people in the West, through mainstream media, only saw images and fragments of reality.

Michel Khleifi, made the first Palestinian fiction shot inside historical Palestine, Wedding in Galilee in 1987, right at the start of the first intifada Elia Suleiman, made one of its most successful film “Divine Intervention” in 2002, when the second intifada kicked off. Art as as a tool of resistance. While Israel and most western governments tried to “disappear” the Palestinian People, they screamed back, louder than ever: “We are alive”. Through on the ground resistance and art, an occupied people made a very powerful statement. Despite the fact that they faced a most powerful state, back up by the only remaining super power in the world, they were here to stay and will not remain silent.

In recent years, films such as 5 broken cameras, Oscar, Salt of this sea, The Times that Remain and Ghost Hunting have broken through the mainstream and its wall of silence and helped put Palestine and its people back on the map.