The Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) brings Palestine-related cinema, narratives, and culture to New England audiences.

The festival features compelling and thought-provoking films, including documentaries, features, rare early works, video art pieces, and new films by emerging artists and youth. These works from directors around the world offer refreshingly honest, self-described, and independent views of Palestine and its history, culture, and geographically dispersed society. Each year, guest filmmakers from various countries and expert commentators add contextual depth to the films.

Schedule:

Friday, October 18, 2024

7:00 p.m: Opening Film at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Teacher
2023, Narrative Drama, 115 min
by Farah Nabulsi

A Palestinian schoolteacher struggles to reconcile his risky commitment to political resistance with the chance of a new relationship with volunteer-worker Lisa, and his emotional support for one of his students Adam.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

12:30 p.m: Life Is Beautiful at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Documentary, 93 min
by Mohamed Jabaly
Life is Beautiful tells the story of how director Mohamed Jabaly fought for his rights as a Palestinian and a filmmaker, when stranded in Norway due to circumstances beyond his control. Through his personal archive and video calls, he shares his love and longing for his hometown, friends and family, as he tries to make a new life for himself in the arctic. The film is a love letter to Gaza, to his adopted hometown in Tromsø, and to the empowering force of storytelling.

3:00 p.m: Mawtini (My Homeland) at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Narrative Short, 19 min
by Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller
Grieving the loss of her grandmother, Nawal fixates on keeping a fig sapling alive, her last remaining connection to Palestine. When she meets Tanya, an older Indigenous woman and the resident trouble-maker in her new apartment building, she learns what resilience and connection to the land under colonialism and capitalism really means.

Aida Returns at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Documentary, 88 min
by Carol Mansour
This is a sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, often absurd story of multiple journeys: the journey of loss as the director’s mother Aida struggled with Alzheimer’s disease finding solace in her repeated "returning" to the Yafa of her youth; the journey of losing a parent; and the ultimate return journey to Yafa where Aida would finally find rest. After her mother’s passing, director Carol Mansour, met friends in Beirut willing to carry Aida back with them to Palestine. The film accompanies Carol as she engineers a way to return her mother aided by an unlikely set of friends and strangers coming together to facilitate what should have been a simple journey. This journey is at the same time very private and yet universal. It is a tribute to the lost past of the director’s family, an attempt to restore part of both an individual and a collective memory, and a poetic nod and affirmation to all those exiled Palestinians forbidden from returning to their hometowns, even after death.

Sunday, October 20, 2024

12:30 p.m: Mar Mama at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Narrative Short, 16 min
by Majdi El Omari
Haunted by her mother’s death and recurring attacks on her city, a young girl becomes obsessed with death. Reality invades their world as her father tries to distract her by making a stop-motion film. When his efforts to shelter his daughter fail, fantasy and imagination cross paths to help her, and in that fraction of time, story frees, and a touch of mar mama’s magic saves.

The Deer’s Tooth at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2024, Narrative Short, 16 min
by Saif Hammash
A young man from a Palestinian refugee camp embarks on a perilous journey in order to fulfill his little brother’s wish: To throw his milk tooth into the sea.

An Orange From Jaffa at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Narrative Short, 26 min
by Mohammed Almughanni
Mohammed, a young Palestinian, is desperately looking for a taxi to take him through an Israeli checkpoint. The driver, Farouk, discovers that Mohammed has already failed to cross the checkpoint. Trouble begins.

Palestine Islands at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Narrative Short, 23 min
by Nour Ben Salem and Julien Menanteau
Maha, 12, is part of the last generation of Palestinian refugees from the Balata camp. After her blind grandfather has a medical episode, Maha imagines a crazy project: to make him believe that the Israeli separation wall has fallen and that a return to his native land is possible. With the help of her friends from the camp, the young girl imagines an adventurous trip for him.

3:00 p.m: Bye Bye Tiberias at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Documentary, 82 min
by Lina Soualem
In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass left her native Palestinian village to follow her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter Lina returns with her to the village and questions for the first time her mother’s bold choices, her chosen exile and the way the women in their family influenced both their lives. Set between past and present, Bye Bye Tiberias pieces together images of today, family footage from the nineties and historical archives to portray four generations of daring Palestinian women who keep their story and legacy alive through the strength of their bonds, despite exile, dispossession, and heartbreak.

7:00 p.m: Lyd at Coolidge Corner Theatre
2023, Documentary, 78 min
by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland
Lyd by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland, is a speculative Documentary that follows the rise and fall of Lyd – a 5,000-year-old metropolis that was once a bustling Palestinian town until it was conquered when the State of Israel was established in 1948 and was renamed Lod. Lyd dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened.

Monday, October 21, 2024

7:00 p.m: Familiar Phantoms at MassArt Design and Media Center
2023, Experimental, 40 min
by Soren Lind and Larissa Sansour
Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Sansour’s own family history and her old childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining scenes filmed in a derelict mansion, Super 8 footage and private photos, the editing mimics the workings of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in search of meaning. Throughout the film, the mansion serves as the seat of memory. In the rooms, vignettes are played out, adding a theatrical dimension, enlarging and exaggerating the narrative components, just as memory perpetually reworks, reinforces, adds and subtracts. While most scenes are acted out by actors, other scenes turn objects and mementos into sculptural installations, a dark space decorated with dozens of suspended love bird cages, a group of taxidermy seagulls sitting on the floor or a free-standing sink full to the brim of lemons.

Three Promises at MassArt Design and Media Center
2023, Documentary, 61 min
by Yousef Srouji
Three Promises is the story of a mother and her camera, of a son and his suppressed memories, and of an entire country. At the start of the 2000s, while the Israeli army is retaliating against the second intifada in the West Bank, Suha films her daily family life, punctuated by frequent trips underground and overwhelmed by the anguish of her two young children. At every moment of intense danger, she promises God that she will leave if they survive. In 2017, her son, the director of this film, discovers this archive and reconnects with this suppressed past, wondering with his mother what drove her to record a daily life of suffering, a stolen childhood, and why she delayed fleeing, paralyzed by the hope for change and burdened by the impossible choice between physical safety and emotional upheaval. While on the surface there emerges the heartrending portrait of everyday life in times of war, it is the staggering beauty of a mother’s love that is revealed between the lines. Blending the voice of the present with impressive family footage, Yousef completes the story begun by Suha, thus averting the act of forgetting, both personal and collective.

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

7:00 p.m: No Other Land at Regent Theatre
2024, Documentary, 96 min
by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.

Thursday, October 24, 2024

6:00 p.m: From Ground Zero (Part 1) at Brattle Theatre
2024, Documentary, 56 min
by Rashid Masharawi and various directors

Each film, ranging in length from 3 to 6 minutes, presents a unique perspective on the current reality in Gaza. The project captures the diverse experiences of life in the Palestinian enclave, including the challenges, tragedies and moments of resilience faced by its people. Using a mix of genres including fiction, Documentary, docu-fiction, animation and experimental cinema, From Ground Zero presents a rich diversity of stories that reflect the sorrow, joy and hope inherent in Gazan life.

Sunday, October 27, 2024

3:00 p.m: To A Land Unknown at Coolidge Corner Theatre
2024, Narrative, 105 min
by Mahdi Fleifel

Chatila and Reda are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens. But when Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his dangerous drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan, which involves them posing as smugglers and taking hostages in an effort to get him and his best friend out of their hopeless environment before it is too late.

Date: October 18 - 27, 2024

Locations:

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA 02446
Regent Theatre, 7 Medford Street, Arlington, MA 02474
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

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