Event Details

Palestine Cinema Days comes to the Twin Cities!

On the somber anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, observed on November 2nd, and in an effort to amplify Palestinian voices, we are screening Bye Bye Tiberias directed by Lina Soualem and Maloul Celebrates Its Destruction by Michel Khleifi at 7:00 p.m. at the Macalester Campus Center Cinema.

The screening is free of charge.
Doors at 6:30. Tickets are first come, first served at the door.

ABOUT THE FILMS

Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem
In her early twenties, Hiam Abbas left her native Palestinian village to follow her dream of becoming an actor in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters. Thirty years later, she returns to the village with her daughter, filmmaker Lina Soualem. They question Hiam’s mother for the first time about her bold decisions and chosen exile, as well as the way the women in their family influenced both of their lives. Set between past and present, Bye Bye Tiberias pieces together images of today with family footage from the nineties and historical archives to portray four generations of daring Palestinian women who keep their story and legacy alive in the face of exile, dispossession, and heartbreak through the strength of their bonds.

Maloul Celebrates Its Destruction by Michel Khleifi
Ma’loul is a Palestinian village in Galilee which was destroyed, with all its inhabitants expropriated, by the Israeli armed forces in 1948.  All that remains of the village are two churches and a mosque, the last visible traces for travellers between Haifa and Nazareth. Over the years, they too disappeared, under a forest planted in memory of the victims of Nazism.

But the former inhabitants of Ma’loul have created a new tradition: that of going for a picnic one day a year on the site of their destroyed village, paradoxically on the day of the independence of the State of Israel. It is the day of the picnic that was filmed; the encounter with a stone, a window, a wall, an olive or a pomegranate tree… hidden under the woods. A peasant notes among the young pines certain uncertain landmarks of his lost universe. A family comments with a naive purity on the mural fresco of their village, painted according to traces from their memory. As required by the official Israeli curriculum, a teacher explains to his Arab students the history of the creation of the State of Israel… These are elements of reality that confront each other and make up the film; they allow us to pose a new dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflic: that of time.