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Reblogged gael-garcia
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The reason the PACBI BDS statement on no other land is especially important is because of its production company that has been boycotted for years before the movie was even made. It's true the language and the ideas surrounding the film are iffy at best, equating the oppressed and oppressor in ways that further the narrative of genocide, but the most relevant issue is that NOL accepted money from a group called "Close Up", which is explicitly an Israeli project that aims to normalize apartheid and occupation.

It's important to remember that part of the reason we even talk about these things is because Palestinians are so thoroughly disenfranchised to the point where we are expected to thank people for recognizing our humanity. Honestly, if you are not Palestinian and you consider yourself a genuine ally, you should sit this discussion out. Many, many Palestinians couch our language and demands when speaking to people about anything related to Palestine so you having a Palestinian friend who thinks BDS is stupid for doing this should realize that you definitely do not have the full context of the discussion and don't understand the nuances of how this affects us. The number of nonPalestinians who have commented on this to let people know they disagree (at best) with BDS is far too high. Some have even gone as far as to assert that BDS is racist against israelis (aka, "the Palestinians are doing reverse racism!"). If you want to read about "Close Up," you can find a written piece by BDS from 2019, following a letter signed by hundreds (!!!) of filmmakers insisting on denouncing the org.

https://bdsmovement.net/news/pacbi-welcomes-statement-more-500-filmmakers-against-close-initiative-normalizing-israeli

[OK to reblog but please do not comment if not Palestinian]

#palestine#news#critique
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Reblogged gael-garcia
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very glad no other land won and seeing it at a local palestinian film festival last year was one of the most impactful experiences i've ever had in a theater like when the text of final end card came up on screen you could feel it hit the whole room, but even in that moment while watching it it was so obvious why the film was framed the way it was and every time i've seen yuval speak during the press tour or read his writing since it's made it more grating… truly hate that to get this film to see the light of day and get even the limited distribution it's had that basel has to like. humor him in this way. and constantly share every stage and platform the film affords them because it is a Shared Project even though it's absolutely basel's story it's his community and family and home and his fucking life

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basel even comments on it in the film itself, the lib zionist perspective yuval has about the problem and how it's going to be solved, but that framework is what the entire premise of this film's existence is built around and especially central to how it's been promoted and talked about globally. it's about their friendship it's about them coming to an understanding, the underlying implication you can fix oppression by making friends with an individual Good Guy who materially benefits from your oppression, whose place in society depends entirely on the existence of this oppressive structure, who decries violent resistance as Just As Bad as the violence committed by the occupation, but he feels bad about it so he has a dream where everyone can one day just get along. that the best way forward is to get this story in front of the right eyeballs in the West, to appeal to the sympathies of global audiences that they might speak out enough to change something… in that way it's very much an oscar film that hollywood typically loves, but because it's about palestine it feels like a miracle that it was acknowledged at all. idk just feels bad man

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good article

“No Other Land” for Whom?
The Palestinian-Israeli documentary indulges in a familiar kind of wishful thinking.
MUBI
The film’s title begs the question, no other land for whom? We hear it in the Palestinians pleading with the Israeli soldier aiming a bulldozer at their homes. But its echoes are also the film’s subtext, the possibility of a future shared between settler and native. A settler has come to help the natives, hoping to redeem himself and, implicitly, the horizons of the settler-state. Where are we supposed to go?, we can imagine an Israeli asking a Palestinian, having been made a guest in their home, once political reality enters their conversation. 
Much of the film, which is ostensibly about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages, is spent tracing the friendship of Adra and Abraham. Several scenes find Adra and Abraham driving in a car, smoking hookah in a restaurant, sitting simply in conversation about the present and the future (the past, beyond that of Masafer Yatta, is generally left alone). Toward the film’s end, during one of these heart-to-hearts, Abraham offers a vision of Israel that no longer denies Adra his rights. He asks Adra to dream with him of a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. “Inshallah,” Adra half-humors his friend. Over the course of the documentary, by talking to Palestinians and witnessing the actions of fellow Israelis, we see the settler growing, learning from the native. We see the settler recognizing, in his limited way, the nature of Zionism at a pace the Palestinian, here exceedingly patient, can’t afford.
While No Other Land tells the story of one Palestinian community’s depopulation, it also stands in for the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace. Abraham introduces himself to the Palestinians with whom he works as yahudi, Jewish. He offers them his time and energy, and risks his safety, to tell their story. “I need to write something about the protest today,” Abraham tells Adra from the passenger seat, while the latter, driving, focuses his eyes on the road. “I have to write more. The article I wrote on Harun’s mom didn’t get many views.” “I feel you’re a little enthusiastic…” Adra says, and Abraham asks him to clarify. “You want everything to happen quickly … as if you’ve come to solve everything in ten days, then go home.” Adra snaps his fingers before returning his hand to the wheel. Abraham remains committed to ending the program of ethnic cleansing committed in his name, but in the film and elsewhere, he attributes those horrors to the “occupation” rather than to Zionism. His condemnation of the former serves to preserve the latter. This distinction is artificial: from the standpoint of its victims, Israel is its occupation, the Zionist project necessarily one of ethnic cleansing and genocide, of total erasure.
Abraham attempts a rehabilitation of an iteration of Zionism that doesn’t exist but could, a familiar settler hope (think, imagine what America could be). In one clip, Abraham appears on Democracy Now! to say, “As an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom.” The possibility of this future depends on the actions of individuals like Abraham, although the film itself reveals the futility of this vision. After the Democracy Now! clip, the film cuts to Abraham on Israeli TV. Here, Palestinians are the other: “They have no voting rights under military occupation,” Abraham says. “Basel, a guy my age who lives there, can’t even leave the West Bank, and we destroy their homes every week—” Here, he is cut off by another Israeli on the panel, calling in remotely: “You’re against Jewish people, in everything you do.” Abraham sighs, then pushes back, calling the man a liar, only to be interrupted by him again: “They’re invaders in a military training ground.” This thinking, not Abraham’s, is at the heart of Zionism. Israeli soldiers and settlers taunt Adra and Abraham repeatedly, goading them to upload the videos they record to see if this might change anything on the ground. In the final footage recorded for the film, we hear Adra on the phone with Israeli authorities, asking for protection. We see armed settlers descend on Masafer Yatta, then Adra’s cousin shot point-blank in his abdomen by a man in a T-shirt. Words flash across the screen, informing us that, since October 2023, many such attacks have continued to take place, prompting Palestinians to flee their homes.
…
The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are “armed” with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest. 
Before the footage capturing the settler attack on Masafer Yatta, during which Adra’s cousin was shot, the producers inform the viewer through an intertitle, “We finished this film in October 2023.” The implications here are obvious, a Pandora’s box that the film, committed to the possibility of a future that accommodates both settler and native, must bend over backward not to touch.

also:

x.com

From Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd:

Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory's charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop on a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer's fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.
#no other land#yuval abraham#palestine#2024#critique
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Reblogged alovesogentle
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Souleymane Cissé: Remembering Africa's Greatest Living Filmmaker
Souleymane Cissé (1940-2025): Remembering Africa's Greatest Living Filmmaker
AKOROKO

It is with profound sadness that I share news of Souleymane Cissé passing today, February 19, 2025, in Bamako, Mali, at age 84.

In the pantheon of African cinema, few figures loom as large as Souleymane Cissé. Often hailed as “Africa’s greatest living filmmaker” (he’s 84), he remains one of the few surviving post-colonial pioneers, with a career that has shaped the continent’s cinematic landscape with influential films like “Yeelen.” His continued involvement in film culture, advocacy for African cinema, and mentorship of emerging filmmakers further solidify his status.

#souleymane cisse#news
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Reblogged alovesogentle
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the idea that films including themes of incest, abuse, or of children showing any kind of sexual behavior, even towards themselves, is if not an offense itself then at least a corollary of offense, a tell-tale sign of a director's intrinsic desire to abuse children, always ends up being wielded against the people who were actually abused by them.

during adele haenel's trial, scenes from the movie les diables, her first movie and the one during which she met christophe ruggia who then proceeded to abuse her, were shown on the big screen. those scenes included footage of her, naked, as a child. the topic of the movie (an incestuous relationship between two siblings who are running away from home) was often brought up as overwhelming evidence of him being a pedophile; it would not have been enough to discuss the actual conditions of the filming, his behavior towards her, the fact that he was allowed to be alone with her at his apartment for entire afternoons, or the lack of power and agency she had regarding the treatment of her own body - ruggia made a movie about incest and therefore he is guilty, or at least, more likely to be guilty and considered as such.

while the scenes were being showed in the courtroom adele haenel was looking away from the screen in visible distress, while he looked confidently at it, her naked childhood body being weaponized in front of a full audience as evidence of his perversion. conveniently, the issue is once again perverts who make sick movies, which proves that they are perverts - not the many people on set who commented on the nature of his attraction towards her, or noticed his behavior, but failed to act in any way; not the film industry as a whole; not the disenfranchisement of children. it is allowed (in fact it is necessary) to submit someone to this humiliation in order to enact punishment on those isolated cases of authority abuse, to protect the dignity of the system as a whole.

#news#adele haenel#pedophilia tw#commentary
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Reblogged blissfullybisexually
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First images from Annemarie Jacir's "most ambitious film to date": "Palestine 36"

The picture is set against the backdrop of 1936 Palestine when the territory was under British mandatory control, and explores the lead-up to and events of the Palestinian Arab Revolt from 1936 to 1939.

Starring Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, Jeremy Irons, Kamel Al Basha, Yasmine Al-Massri, Jalal Altawil, Robert Aramayo, Yafa Bakri, Karim Daoud Anaya, Billy Howle, Dhafer L’Abidine and Liam Cunningham.

Key crew on the film include cinematographer Hélène Louvart (La Chimera, Motel Destino), editor Tania Reddin (Hard Truths), production designer Nael Kanj (The Teacher, Wajib) and composer Ben Frost (Dark).

#palestine 36#annemarie jacir#2025#palestine
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Reblogged alovesogentle
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making a movie called the brutalist and then never mentioning socialist bloc while appropriating brutalist architecture for lowkey zionist propaganda is crazy. "ITS ABOUT THE DESTINATION NOT JOURNEY" PART?!

#critique
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Reblogged bideogaymes
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if you have a chance to watch “i’m still here” pls do

(source)

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"i'm still here" has earned three nominations at the oscars: best picture, best international feature film and fernanda torres, who plays the protagonist, received a nomination for best actress. fernanda torres becomes the second brazilian actress nominated for best actress oscar, 26 years after her mother fernanda montenegro.

#i'm still here#walter salles#brazil#2024#commentary
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Reblogged alovesogentle
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whenever you find yourself baffled, even enraged, by who the Academy rewards and who they don't - i find remembering that the Academy Awards were created by Hollywood mogul Louis B Mayer with the specific purpose of preventing mass unionisation helps. Mayer figured if Hollywood workers were made to think of themselves as artists rather than labourers they'd be less inclined to unionise. Of the awards, Mayer famously said in the late 1920s, "if I give them cups and awards, they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted." Also by awarding and inviting few, Mayer and the Academy pushed individualist aspirations and exceptionalism over collectivism. Considering the upcoming Writers Guild strike over the exploitation streaming has created that Hollywood producers are trying to suppress (which is why a lot of shows are being cancelled btw because they don't want to pay writers), this anti-union legacy is still clearly alive and well. The majority of these Hollywood award shows were not created to actually award artistic merit, but to create an illusion of artistic meritocracy that would stifle solidarity among workers. So, whenever you find yourself baffled, even enraged, by who the Academy rewards and who they don't, remember that's not what they're really for.

#commentary
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