IMEU Institute for Middle East Understanding
When news emerged of this year's goodie bag for Oscar nominees, director Mike Leigh – himself nominated five times in the past – went public to express his incredulity at one of the items included – a $55,000 VIP trip to Israel. Leigh urged star actors and directors to turn down the government-sponsored freebie, or hand it over to one of the world's 4.8 million Palestinian refugees.
on February 26, 2016
The Israel Defense Forces soldier who wounded Rehab Nazzal in Bethlehem on Friday, December 11, 2015, by shooting her in the shin, didn’t know who she is. He didn’t know her name; that she was born in Qabatiyah, near Jenin; that she is 55, and also a Canadian citizen; that she teaches art at a college in Bethlehem; that one of her exhibitions angered the Israeli ambassador in Canada; or that she’s writing an interdisciplinary doctoral thesis that’s impossible to summarize in a sentence...
on February 8, 2016
The lights were dim and the audience whispered. The viewers watched the screen to see what would happen to the hero of the film “Oversized Coat,” which screened Dec. 26 at the Red Crescent Society hall. Gazans watched the film in an uplifted mood, one the city had been not seen for decades.
on January 31, 2016
It was an LGBT-themed film festival held outside the borders of Palestine, featuring a number of works by directors who were neither gay nor Palestinian. But the first-ever Kooz Queer fest, which had a modest bow earlier this month in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, made little ripples of history in its own right.
on December 4, 2015
The Wanted 18 is an animated film showing how a group of activists in the town of Beit Sahour, West Bank, set up a collective farm to produce local Palestinian milk to substitute for dairy supplies from Israel. The locals, who were mainly academics and professionals, had no prior experience in running dairy farms. They decided to set up an informal co-operative and managed to buy 18 cows from a kibbutznik (an Israeli peace campaigner).
on September 25, 2015
One day in the late 1990s, Safaa Dabour left her home in Nazareth and traveled to Tel Aviv. She had heard that one of the theaters was screening the film “Chronicle of a Disappearance,” by Nazareth-born Palestinian-Israeli director Elia Suleiman, and because she very much wanted to see it, she decided to head for the big city.
on September 24, 2015
Palestinian-American Profiles
Basma Alsharif is Palestinian-American visual artist who works in film, photography, and installation, and who explores the human condition as it relates to geopolitics through her art. Her work has been shown at major exhibitions all over the world, including at Les Modules at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, and the Riwaq Biennial in Palestine.
on August 3, 2015
Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, director of A People Without a Land, is a man on a mission. As he says in an interview, his support for a one-state solution is part of a personal journey which has taken him from Zionist Jewish Orthodoxy (and his wife Pennie from fervent Christian Zionism) to believing in single-state coexistence in Palestine.
on July 8, 2015
In the occupied West Bank, almost anything can come to be seen as a threat to Israel’s security. Even cows. Yes, cows. Here’s the story: During the activism of the first Palestinian intifada, residents of the West Bank town of Beit Sahour organized boycotts of Israeli goods in an act of civil disobedience intended to pressure the government. Local activists in 1988 hatched a plan to bypass Israeli suppliers and produce milk locally.
on June 24, 2015