Palestinian films continue to reign supreme at Boston Film Festival

By Steven Stotsky

Paradise Now

BOSTON, Mass. – This week, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston is wrapping up its sixth annual weeklong Palestinian film series. Bestowing such importance upon Palestinian films seems out of step at a time when the West Bank and Gaza remain relatively placid in comparison to events unfolding throughout the Middle East.

But rather than introduce audiences to the broader Arab culture at such a crucial juncture, the film program limits its audience to Palestinian films recycling the usual and increasingly stale theme of Israeli mistreatment.

The MFA’s focus on the Palestinians evidences a failure to stay current and explore what’s new. What self-imposed obstacles impede the administrators of the film program from reaching out to filmmakers in the region beyond the narrow confines of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza? Surely, among the 200 million people in the Arab-dominated states of the Middle East and North Africa there must be many filmmakers eager to share their stories and document their societies in a moment of wrenching transition.

One cannot help but wonder if the MFA’s adherence to the limited selection of Palestinian films year after year is due to misplaced priorities, giving greater weight to a political agenda over contemporary relevance and new themes. The complacency of the program implicates the benefactors of the program as well, who continue to fund a program that attaches greater importance to promoting the Palestinian cause than to revealing the less well understood, but more profound transformation in the region.

It is not as if Palestinian films suffer from lack of exposure. It is the Palestinian’s good fortune to have Israel, a westernized Jewish state, as its enemy. During the height of the Second Intifada in 2001-2004, international interest in Palestinian films flowed from the intense news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict portraying the Palestinians as the underdog.

Private Sun

This enabled the Palestinians to garner celebrity victim status among an influential element who patronize independent films. But the Intifada had burned itself out by the time the MFA initiated its Palestinian film series in 2007. The MFA, rather than acting as a leading edge for new films, instead relegated itself to the role of a trendy follower.

Numerous Palestinian and Israeli-made films portraying Palestinian victimization at the hands of Israeli occupiers received widespread attention at important film festivals. Some films like “Ford Transit” and “Paradise Now” were feted by the media. Many Palestinian films lambaste Israel in propagandistic fashion. “Writers on the Borders,” a film that featured several Nobel Prize winners in literature was one especially noxious example. In that film, Portuguese author Jose Saramago odiously asserted: “what is happening in Palestine is a crime on the same plane as Auschwitz.”

In 2005, the Sundance Cable TV channel, associated with the popular Sundance film festival, repeatedly aired over the course of several months eight Palestinian and Israeli films that portray Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians only as victims.

Palestinian victimization is again a major theme of this year’s selection of films for the Palestine series. The MFA website provides an overview of the 2012 film topics include the following:

• A film about released Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails

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