A First Look at London Palestine Film Festival
London Palestine Film Festival, set to run from November 15th to 29th, acknowledges the tangible condition of the diaspora. Understanding the nostalgia of displacement, the LPFF has brought Palestine to London in a 2-week-festival that quenches a thirst for a home many have never visited.
This year’s programme promises to ground us in a reality that is often left unheard as it showcases Palestinian creatives' ability to navigate a desperate situation while simultaneously enjoying the liberty that comes with being able to narrate one’s own story. The lineup this year truly outdoes itself.
Starting the festival with a slight deviation with Elias Matar’s one-woman show, A Grain of Sand, where he invites the viewers to consider Renad, a young girl in Gaza, whose only form of escape from oppression is her imagination. Matar wants the audience to let their own imagination run with Renad’s, creating an enmeshment of the tangible and real, the subversive and untouchable. The impact of the show is dependent on just how far you're willing to allow Renad to convince you.
This is then juxtaposed by the final film, From Ground Zero (2024), a ‘portmanteau of films made in Gaza over the past year’. Rashid Masharawi initiated a project of 22 short films that combine: fiction, documentary, docu-fiction, experimentary cinema, and animation. This amalgamation and exemplification of the indefatigable spirit of the people of Gaza through a year of destruction and war is unmissable. This film is a call out from the people of Gaza to those in the diaspora, and those who are watching them on screen, allowing them to control their narrative despite their material condition.
This abstract start and direct finish was a distinct decision by the organisers to part with us on a note that is harrowing, raw, and real but deeply personal as it puts us in direct conversation with the media we are consuming,
This idea of telling your own narrative, and how easily that right can be taken away is showcased most clearly in Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film. Aljafari explores the impacts of the Israeli 1982 looting of Palestinian archives in Beirut, and how now it effectively holds memory, understanding, and the right to control a narrative hostage. Aljafari poses the question; when the proof of your existence is dependent on a keeper that refuses to acknowledge you, how do you exist in public memory?
The film festival is showcasing multiple documentaries, to name a few; Larissa Sansour’s Familiar Phantoms (2023) is an experimental documentary about her family history that blends the aspects of documentary with a theatrical note. Lyd (2023) by Rami Younes and Sarah Ema Friedland uses science-fiction to explore testimonies of violence in the death place of Saint George, Lydda, or Lod. There will also be a screening of Edward Said’s final 2003 interview with Mike Dibb, where he discussed his work The Question of Palestine.
In To a Land Unknown (2024), Mahdi Fleifel takes on the task of conveying what the identity of being a Palestinian refugee truly is. It explores the idea of smuggling and how it has formed a name for itself in the community. No longer is the Palestinian refugee an abstract thought; we see the instantiation of how exploitation and hopelessness have hooked themselves in the aspirations of the diaspora.
The 2024 London Palestine Film Festival offers a unique and powerful cinematic experience that you won’t want to miss. This year’s programme promises a brilliant blend of imagination and reality. From the whimsical storytelling of A Grain of Sand to the raw impact of From Ground Zero, the festival invites you to explore the Palestinian street and screen.
The London Palestine Film Festival’s programme can be found here and it will be running across many cinemas in London, so make sure to buy your tickets soon!
Edited by Humaira Valera, Co-Film & TV Editor
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