Struggling to Be Seen: The Travails of Palestinian Cinema

Abstract

In this slim and affordable book, Anandi Ramamurthy and Paul Kelemen write with authority from their respective engagements as professors, curators, and activists. Struggling to Be Seen: The Travails of Palestinian Cinema educates newcomers to the Palestinian struggle, but it can also be appreciated by the Palestine-solidarity base for its concise overview of the challenges, past and present, characterizing Palestinian cinema. As such, it delivers the objectives of its publisher, Daraja Press, in creating cultures of solidarity and supporting emancipatory struggles of oppressed people across the world. Relying on primary documents and field-based methodology, this book offers an accessible primer for undergraduate and graduate classes, as well as the general public. It consists of an introduction, six short chapters, a conclusion, and twenty pages of back matter, including a filmography and four appendices that provide colorful visual documentations corresponding to the chapters. Across these components, the authors identify essential issues and challenges from production to exhibition and reception, key figures and texts, and recommended films. In so doing, they situate the creation and sustenance of Palestinian cinema as crucial to countering the erasure of Palestine, particularly when screened within Western cultural centers. They frame their book as the outcome of collaborative research conducted with Palestinian film organizations and British cultural organizations to examine the programming of Palestinian cinema in the UK, which they offer as potentially instructive to such programming in other countries. This comparison is clarified in the chapters described below. The book skims the history of Palestinian filmmaking (chapter 1, pp. 7–12), presenting examples of contemporary resistance through collective endeavors focused on building film culture in Palestine. It follows organizations like Filmlab in Ramallah (chapter 2, pp. 13–19), Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem, and the Palestine Film Institute in Jerusalem (chapter 1) to demonstrate the continuity of Palestinian cinema despite the challenges created by the political impasse of the Israeli occupation. The authors’ main concern with the preservation of Palestinian cinema is evidenced (chapter 3, pp. 20–28) in the experience they recount of restoring five revolutionary films held in private collections, to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba. They provide short analyses of several films, both fiction and documentary (chapter 4, pp. 29–35), that exemplify the difficulties of checkpoints, borders, exile, and displacement that have asserted their thematic significance in Palestinian cinema. They note (chapter 5, pp. 36–42) the increasing number of Palestinian filmmakers since the early 2000s and discuss the necessity of creating spaces and opportunities to see their films while trying to reach wider audiences beyond the base. Lastly, they address (chapter 6, pp. 43–51) a new genre of short films made by Palestinian filmmakers that exemplifies innovative storytelling modes and techniques, as well as the difficulty of obtaining funding for feature filmmaking. It is this last chapter that reveals the most compelling contribution of the book, which is its usefulness outside academic settings and as a model for film programmers. The authors