Eye on Palestine: a look behind the wall

(Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle)

It must be said that, in the domain of film, the Palestinians hold their own. Quite apart from the big names and the festival favourites such as Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention), Hany Abu-Assad (whose Omar was nominated for an Oscar), and Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea), they just keep on turning them out. Is it because there are so many terrible things to recount and so much to set right? Whatever the reason, there is plenty of material for a festival. So the Masereelfonds, MENARG, the KVS, the Pianofabriek, the Vrede non-profit association, and Victoria Deluxe are organising one. Eye on Palestine aims to provide a platform for artists with particular visions of Palestinian reality.

Originally, it was just a film festival, but it has now been extended to include other art forms. One of the exhibitions in the KVS consists of a video installation by Mirna Bamieh. The raw material for This Mined Land of Ours is made up of little online films made with mobile phones during the commemoration of the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. On 15 May 2011, Palestinians tried to cross the Israeli border from Syria on the occupied Golan Heights. Frame by frame, Bamieh has blotted out the landscape so that only a strange procession remains. There will also be concerts by Toot Ard (mountain reggae) and AlefBa, an ensemble put together for the occasion that includes Fabrizio Cassol on sax and Mustafa Said on oud.

(Leila and the Wolves)

An extensive film programme remains at the festival’s heart. Heiny Srour will be present to introduce Leila and the Wolves, her thirty-year-old film, powerful both visually and in its content, about the role and the difficult position of Palestinian and Lebanese women. The US director David Koff will be along to introduce work that has also gained in force and significance over the years. In 1981, long before the first intifada, his documentary Occupied Palestine took an in-depth look at the day-to-day misery and the roots of the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians, taking a close look at both Zionism and stubborn resistance.

There will, of course, also be more recent work, including Infiltrators, a documentary in which director Khaled Jarrar films groups and individuals who try every possible (and sometimes impossible) way to get past the infamous wall with which Israel seeks to protect itself on the West Bank of the Jordan. Eye on Palestine has one sad advantage: you know what will be talked about after the screening.

EYE ON PALESTINE 24/3 > 6/4, KVS_BOL, Lakensestraat 146 rue de Laeken, Brussel/Bruxelles, KVS_BOX, Arduinkaai 9 quai aux Pierres de Taille, Brussel/Bruxelles & Pianofabriek, rue du Fortstraat 35, Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles, www.eyeonpalestine.be