united screens for palestine

Scenes of Occupation from Gaza

Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973, 13’

A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. The film won the prize as best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and was screened at multiple festivals. It was the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.

Introduction to the End of an Argument

Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman, 1990, 41’41’’

With a combination of Hollywood, European and Israeli film, documentary, news coverage and excerpts of ‘live’ footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, Introduction to the end of an argument / Speaking for oneself… Speaking for others… critiques representation of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video tape mimics the dominant media’s forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction. A process of displacement and deconstruction is enacted attempting to arrest the imagery and ideology, decolonizing and recontextualizing it to provide a space for a marginalized voice consistently denied expression in the media. Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the Occupied Territories, has come to the makers courtesy of the media. And it is through the media that their impressions of the uprising have accreted via image and text.