Review by Maggie Scott

EDWARD SAID: The Last Interview, Arafat & I, Noor, Pickled, Neighbours and The Time That Remains.

 Having worked and lived in the Middle East some years ago, plus being an avid fan of the keen intellect of the late academic and philosophic writer Edward Said, I was more or less sure of the ilk of what was being served as film fare in the programme of the Palestinian Film Festival 2009.   Consequently, I was  looking forward to some intellectual stimulation and nostalgic Palestinian cinematography and culture.

I was initially booked in for two film sessions at the festival venue, the Mercury Cinema, near the Morphett Bridge, and ended up staying for three – a marathon six plus hours of first-class movie watching – all of which passed in a flash.

 First there was the insightful EDWARD SAID: The Last Interview, directed by Mike Dibb and recorded a few months before Said eventually succumbed to what had been a 10-year battle with leukaemia in September, 2003.  Here Said revealed his greatness, his humility by sharing his inner-most thoughts and sentiments on many fronts including his relationship with his Palestinian family as a school student and later with his wife and children when he revisited his Arabic roots for short trips home after having lived and worked in the United States for decades.

 This seminal last interview covered Said’s works and his intellectual thinking (including discussing elements of the standard 1978 tomb Orientalism, which remains required reading at most universities in the West and the Middle East).  As the interview progressed Said explained that he approached his writings as a literary academic with Western values and dual understandings imbedded through higher education and associated collegial values honed at Princeton and other US institutions as well as those acquired through his childhood experiences and celebrated Palestinian acquaintances.

While he is was an esteemed political commentator on the Middle East in general; and on the Palestinian question in particular, Said also made it clear he never consider himself to be a politician, in fact, he never taught social sciences and revealed that he approached his books and political commentaries from a centrist literary and humanist standpoint that viewed key players from all ethnicities without rage or cultural shackles but with imbedded common sense and a deep sense of social justice that continually demanded a workable solution for the good of the common Palestinian and not just for those self servers in power.

Throughout the Edward Said interview, I was very much aware of the greatness of the man and wondered if Said would have entered the world of Palestinian politics, and from that standpoint been able to impress his profound and seemingly workable solutions on the Middle East, had he not been afflicted by a life-threatening disease that engulfed and eventually curtailed his life and work in mid stream.

 The second film session I viewed was Arafat & I, and other short films. It was here that an element of surprise crept in with the realisation that Palestinian filmmaking had come of age and was no longer couched in traditional values that had previously, in this reviewer’s opinion, suppressed artistic freedom to some degree. Arafat and I directed by Mahdi Fliefel was made without any such social taboos, and portrayed two modern young Palestinians living in London.

 One considered himself to “be a Londoner” first and foremost, while his friend was besotted with Chairman Arafat and Palestinian culture but was equally happy to date and bed his English girlfriend (who shared her birthday on the same date with Arafat) while trying to engage her interest in a biography of the Chairman and her understanding of his Palestinian background and identity. Sadly the relationship failed because the character was clumsy in his attempts to understand and prematurely change his English girlfriend into an evaluated soul mate sympathetic to the national struggle.

 I thoroughly enjoyed this refreshing short, which set the pace for the four others that followed; all in some way expressing Palestinian politics of exile and identity.  The dark Noor directed by Eyas Salman (starring the attractive actor Saleh Bakri dealt with an exceptionally harsh relationship between father and son, which ended in madness and mayhem; the comedic Pickled, directed by Razi Najjar, which is set in the beautiful coastal city of Akka and provides an insight into the lives and cultural practices of Palestinians living in Israel, Neighbours (directed by Georgina Asfour) is concerned with neighbourhood differences between Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Moslems who live separately in the same street under Israeli occupation in the Old City of Jerusalem  but who come together as one when trouble comes knocking.  Altogether this is an entertaining and refreshing set of short, amusing and insightful films.

 The third session I attended was a film that I had overlooked when deciding on what to see in this festival. It was the standout almost chaplinesque offering The Time That Remains directed by one of the most celebrated Palestinian directors Elia Suleiman. This film is autobiographical in essence and centres on his parents and his own childhood experiences mixed with the tribulations of daily life of those Palestinians who remained and became a minority in their homeland after 1948.  Suleiman played himself as an adult and appeared in the film as an observer rather than a participant even in his family home.

 One priceless and memorable David and Goliath scene (witnessed by Suleiman) was a gigantic Israeli tank with its gun trained on a young Palestinian man as he puts his household rubbish in the bin outside his home and then takes a mobile phone call from his friends arranging to meet them at the local nightclub late that night completely oblivious to the tank gun almost next him and moving in balletic sync as he paces up and down on the pavement outside his house. This is the kind of film one should buy and watch over and over again. Not just Palestinian cinema but world cinema at its best!

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