tale of the three jewels dir. michel khleifi 1995

Lakota Nation vs. United States (2022, Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli)

Lakota Nation vs. United States (2022, Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli)

Would you like another way to help raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians? Please consider participating in the above silent auction! It goes to a very, very good cause and there are some pretty cool items/experiences up for auction!

In doing so you could...

... and more!!

If you cannot participate, or would prefer to give directly, regardless of where you are based:

Medical Aid for Palestinians

Operation Olive Branch

Palestine Children's Relief Fund

UNRWA

Help Gaza Children

Mutual Aid Fund for Gaza & Help Mona's Family Leave Gaza (only $5000 away from meeting their goal!)

Click to Help

it’s VERY strange how moonlight is one of the greatest films of our lifetime but also the film that gets the most responses when I bring it up that people haven’t seen it because they “know it’ll wreck me” as to opposed to understanding it as a BEAUTIFUL GIFT of a gay coming of age romance with a tender and forgiving ending! the reputation that has been cultivated around it as a difficult, traumatic movie is literally just racist. treating gorgeous and poignant art like an off-putting anthropology assignment is vile. just say you are scared of stories about poor black people.

In the midst of the euphoria over the Oppenheimer awards sweep, please never forget that it was executive produced by this genocidal Zionist cunt

Anyways, here pro-Palestine academic Hamid Dabashi's review of Oppenheimer

What’s crazy is that James woods is still alive?! 💀

Sadly 😔 That man is fueled by hate I swear.

Hundreds of Jews and allies, including Writers Against the War on Gaza, sagaftramembersforceasefire and Film Workers for Palestine are present in the heart of Hollywood on the day of the Oscars to say: ALL EYES ON RAFAH!

While Hollywood celebrates, Israel prepares for the ground invasion of Rafah, where over 1.3 million Palestinians are seeking refuge. This comes as reports of extreme hunger continue to mount on the first day of Ramadan.

As filmworkers, Jews, and allies, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians. We won’t stop bearing witness. WHILE YOU’RE WATCHING, BOMBS ARE DROPPING" from Jewish Voice for Peace Los Angeles, 10/Mar/2024:

ArteEast has an online program--Archives of Power--screening several Palestinian films for free from March 7-17 !

ma'loul celebrates its destruction (1985, dir. michel khleifi) is available on youtube btw

Excerpt from Revolutionary Lebanese film Leila & the Wolves(1984)

This film is about the collective memory of+silent, forgotten sacrifices women have made throught modern Levantine history; spearheading movements and playing instrumental roles in the fight for liberation and self determination, only to end up relegated to the margins of history, it centers on interdependence of Levantine national liberation movements & liberation of women, using archival footage+dramatisations of situations faced by women in modern Lebanese+Palestinian history.

Film Workers for Palestine is a call by and for filmmakers and cinema workers to stand for an end to genocide, and for a free Palestine. Beginning with a statement of values, FWP will build spaces and infrastructure for organizing in response to the war on Palestinians and to the censoring of voices that speak out against Israel's genocidal campaign.

Happy Palestinian Film Thursday!

Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War 1971 Masao Adachi, Kôji Wakamatsu

ngl feel some kind of dissonance every time i see westerners praising the current spate of hindi period-based action films and i know objectively its because they lack the context but approximately 99.999% of them are being very much leveraged in the whole hindu fash ethnonationalist project if not being actively made by actual hindu fash/filmmakers on the way to being hindu fash ethnonationalists

(learn more)

Commentary on Schindler's List, 1994, from ArbeiterInnen Standpunkt (translated)

When i started youtube i did a survey of video essays to make sure like what i wanted to do wasn’t already being done.

And i looked at a bunch of black and queer video essayists in particular to see the field.

i did watch james somerton’s knock off Celluloid Closet video and i clocked it immediately like girl that’s everybody’s first intro to queer cinema. the doc was put up in 10 min chunks on youtube since 2006. they put the whole thing up on youtube the same year it lifted the 10min limit back in 2010. you not slick!

but every other queer film person on youtube does it too. they’d be nothing without Vito Russo. And they take from b ruby rich’s new queer cinema reader. that’s the scope of their understanding of queer film. And in the NQC reader there’s an essay on Queer Third Cinema which is just queer cinema of the Third World….which is a complete misunderstanding of Third Cinema. the NQC reader had its share of critics at the time of its publication. but they don’t know that.

And the black film people are hopelessly trying to reinvent Donald Bogle. every black video essayist has their own proprietary trope that is a manifestation of a tom, coon, mulatto, mammy, etc. There’s a reason bogle was, in a sense, generic because how these tropes continue to live change with the times but the core remains the same.

I’ve seen videos about the LA Rebellion as a movement from UCLA. I can’t remember if she said it in spirits of the rebellion or w/e but Julie has a line that goes something like “we weren’t a movement just a bunch of black kids at the same film school” and everybody hated UCLA. The LA Rebellion happened in spite of UCLA. Elyseo Taylor, who headed the program that we attribute to the LA rebellion —the ethnocommunications program— was fired after a year and the program shut down at the same time because the white failsons of producers weren’t getting the special funds the “blacks” were. And the LA Rebellion existed outside of UCLA too. The major actors of the movement studied or worked at The Performing Arts Society of LA (PASLA); Larry Clark taught cinematography there as well.

i know the hbomberguy video is about plagiarism but the other major issue with the youtube video essay industrial complex is that it’s giving “hey guys i’m taking media studies 101 and i just learned something that’s gonna blow your mind! It’s called the male gaze”

This is absolutely true, and super fucking frustrating—perhaps more so because there's a degree to which it's inescapable.

A slightly older journalist once tried to clarify to me something about legacy publications by relating a decidedly pre-Internet joke that went something like "as long as there are kids moving to the city after college, Vice will have a built-in customer base."

Obviously, what the internet broke about that was not the built-in customer base—it was the monopoly of legacy periodicals on dissemination of information.

In other words, one inescapable facet here is that the number of people who have not encountered media studies 101 is always increasing at a faster rate than the number of people who have encountered media studies 101. (Obviously, this is true of all sorts of information, especially if it is to any degree historical.)

And whether it's via a 1990s print article, or a Buzzfeed Community post, or a YouTube video, there seems to be a serendipitous collision of curious people who want to share what they've learned (regardless of how accurate, let alone comprehensive, it is) and other people who are curious to learn whatever things through a (sorry) gatekeeper but not to do the reading themselves. (r/TodayILearned, which currently coexists with whatever form du jour, is further proof. And frankly, each of us has specific topics for which we are in the latter group, so it seems unproductive to blame them per se.)

What drives me fucking crazy is the elision (by editors, writers, whatever) of "new to me" and "new." When I get cynical I feel like it must be purposeful, but let's be honest: most of us are not very well informed about anything, and there are plenty of culture creators that i would rank a standard deviation behind, depending on the subject. And on some level these regurgitators, whatever their form, are simply meeting the audience where it is. No one who watches YouTube analysis is going to read an old Buzzfeed post, just as no one reading Buzzfeed posts was going back to magazine articles, just as no one reading magazine articles, etc.

To be clear, there is a logic to the cynicism: You can't sell subscriptions or ads to something someone else did that happens to be new to you. Ironically, the direct plagiarism of James Somerton really underlines that the work of reading something and summing it up for someone else is work, and in particular, it's work that people consider valuable above and beyond a legal framework. (And many of his most blatant errors underscore that he didn't actually do that work himself.)

But in ~the marketplace of ideas~ that means that if I publish something for which media studies 101 is a prerequisite, I'm already a specialty publication with a limited audience, so in terms of impact (let alone monetization) I'm dead in the water. (I can envision one exception: building an audience that grows with me, so I do media studies 101 first, and then people like my article/video/whatever and keep following me, and then I can say "building on my previous video" or whatever. But that still means I'm doing yet another regurgitation of media studies 101.)

Honestly this is kind of what has led me to follow a lot of the people I do on Tumblr and elsewhere. They are where I try to be: realizing their thoughtful, interrogative analysis has no audience and writing it anyway.

And yet, even within that framework, I would need more than two hands to count on my fingers the examples of good analysis on social media that has been lifted, in part or in whole, occasionally with citation but often not, by academics. Some have become so demoralized by this—understandably—that they have simply stopped.

I guess all of this is to say none of this is new and I hope someone else sees a way out, because I don't!

Correct! And Vibration Cinema is a part of this phenomenon as well. VC has been taught in film studies and media studies courses. Often times (from what professors/students who’ve reached out to me have said) the episodes are presented in class as the dialectical challenge to the normative thought.

In a way I positioned VC as such. A sort of 102 to 201 level of engagement for those who know the basics. And i figured —wrongly— beginners would still be able to understand like how language teachers use immersion techniques (immersion works well when i teach but not for a youtube audience🤧). The intermediate nature of VC is decidedly not monetizable and slow to grow, like you said.

We’re entrenched in parasocial relationships and the attention economy. So naturally “learn along with me” style videos are profitable. I think it’s a problem youtube can’t incentivize their algorithm against if they even wanted to. Americans are worked to death so how can you pursue knowledge when you have to put food on the table? Public education is intentionally crumbling and seen as heathenous anti-American indoctrination. ~54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level. You can watch a video essay while cooking or listen to a podcast while commuting.

Another thing that i’ve found is that the internet is widely different from when i was younger. And i made another mistake by setting the channel up as an approximation of my online learning experience, which by internet standards is pre-history.

Back in the day you could learn to change a lens or fill a breakdown sheet but there weren’t a hundred videos on the French New Wave regurgitating the American Andrew Sarris. If FNW was mentioned, it was in passing and you’d have to actually go seek that knowledge and READ (i’ve had pdfs of the 50s-70s archive of chaiers du cinema since late high school!).

But now since everything is spoon fed to you and a 3 hour video seems exhaustive, your curiosity is satiated so why bother looking any further. I accompany my videos with links to a bunch of further readings and nobody’s clicking on those 🤣

but even if someone wants to learn more, where could they go? With DMCA striking everything, you have to be savvy to find stuff now and a lot of stuff i didn’t archive 10 years ago are gone. Everything is mostly paywalled or on the brink of extinction (see hatchette vs internet archive).

Though I come from institutional Marxist (undergrad) and Black (grad) traditions of filmmaking/studies, there’s a fair amount of autodidactism to my education. And i was able to learn about whatever because it was freely available on the internet. And that isn’t a reality anymore. And what i couldn’t find, i could access a network of strangers on forums to get something at least. But social media killed that. Most ppl are conspicuous consumers or worse: i “found” this and im not sharing!

“I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it." -Vili Fualaau, the inspiration for Joe Yoo in May December

I made a post last summer about being iffy on May December because the real life man this affected (Vili Fualaau) is still alive and dealing with his trauma, and he's finally speaking out about the movie. He said he admires films that handle the complexities of real-life events and would have been willing to work together with the crew to tell his story, but he was never contacted by any of the filmmakers.

The lead in May December is Natalie Portman's character and Joe (Fualaau) plays a supporting in his own story. The screenwriter, Samy Burch, insists that the real life case of Mary Kay Letourneau taking advantage of Fualaau was just a "jumping off point" and not their story. How strange for a film that's supposed to be about how Hollywood exploits and hurts real life individuals for "art" to do the same thing in real life.

I hate that a poc who was preyed on by a white woman, has had his story twisted and exploited by another one almost 30 years later.

BYE BYE TIBERIAS (2023)

An intimate documentary about four generations of women (great-grandmother Um Ali, grandmother Nemat, mother Hiam Abbass, and director Lina Soualem, Hiam Abbass's daughter) and their shared legacy of exile.

PALESTINE FILM INDEX

Palestine Film Index is a growing list of films from and about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, made by Palestinians and those in solidarity with them. The index starts with films from the revolutionary period (68 - 82) made by the militant filmmakers of the Palestine Film Unit and their allies, and extends through a multitude of voices to the present day. It is by no means a complete or exhaustive representation of the vast universe that is Palestinian cinema, but is only a small fragmentary list that we hope nontheless can be used as an instrument of study & solidarity. As tools of knowledge against zionist propaganda and towards Palestinian liberation.

The century long war against Palestinians by the zionist project is one waged not only militarily but also culturally. The act of filmmaking, preservation, and distribution becomes an act against this attempted cultural erasure of ethnic cleansing. The power inherent in this form as a weapon against the genocidal project of zionism is evidenced in the ways it has been historically & currently targeted by the occupation forces: from the looting & stealing of the Palestine Cinema Institute archives during the siege of Beirut in 1982, through the long history of targeted assassinations of Palestinian filmmakers, journalists, artists, & writers (from PFU founder Hani Jawharieh, to Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Refaat Alareer, and the over 100 journalists killed in the currently ongoing war on Gaza).

It is in this spirit of the use of film and culture as a way of focusing & transmitting information & knowledge that we hope this list can be used as one in an assortment of educational tools against hasbara (a coordinated and intricate system of zionist propaganda, media manipulation, & social engineering, etc) and all forms of propaganda that is weaponized against the Palestinian people. Zionist media & its collaborators remain one of the most effective fronts of the war, used to manufacture consent through deeply ingrained psychological manipulation of the general public agency. Critical and autonomous thought must be used as a tool of dismantling these frameworks. In this realm, film can play a vital roll in your toolkit/arsenal. Film must be understood as one front of the greater resistance. We hope in some small way we can help to distribute these manifestations of Palestinian life and the struggle towards liberation.

This list began as small aggregation to share among friends and comrades in 2021 and has since expanded to the current and growing form (it is added to almost every day). We have links for through which each film can be viewed along with descriptions, details such as run time, year, language, etc. We also have a supplemental list of related materials (texts, audio, supplemental video) that is small but growing. We have added information on contacts for distributors and filmmakers of each film in order to help people or groups who are interested in using this list to organize public screenings of these films. The makers of this list do not control the rights to these films and we strongly urge those interested in screening the works to get in touch with the filmmaker or distributors before doing so. This list was made with best intentions in mind, and in most cases with permission of filmmaker or through a publically available link, but if any film has mistakenly been added without the permission of a filmmaker involved and you would like us to remove it, or conversely if you are a filmmaker not included who would like your film to be added, or for any other thoughts, suggestions, additions, subtractions, complaints or concerns, please contact us at palestinefilmindex@gmail.com. No one involved in this list is doing it as a part of any organization, foundation or non-profit and we are not being paid to do this, it is merely a labor of love and solidarity. From the river to the sea, Palestine