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Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza

A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing tech- niques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. The film won the prize as best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and was screened at multiple festivals. It was the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.

Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza

NR 1973
Palestine in the Eye

Palestine in the Eye chronicles the profound impact of Hani Jawharieh’s death for the PLO Film Unit. The film reflects on his life through interviews with family, colleagues, and his own cinematography, including the moment of his death while filming for the Unit in 1976. Although the film has later been attributed to Mustafa Abu Ali, the Unit’s method of work was to describe everyone as a collective of “workers,” and we see this in the film titles, which collectively list the names of all those who participated as a non-hierarchical collective. Through this reflection on Jawharieh, we are offered an understanding of the workings of the Palestine Film Unit and its international connections.

Palestine in the Eye

NR 1977
America of the seventies. On the banks of the Mississippi

In the next episode of the series "America of the Seventies" political observer Valentin Zorin travels through the most "European" city in the USA, the capital of jazz - New Orleans. Throughout the country from the northern borders to the Gulf of Mexico, the mighty Mississippi carries its waters - a river toiler, a river that feeds many generations of Americans who have lived and now live on its banks. At its mouth, at the confluence with the Gulf of Mexico, is New Orleans. However, this New Orleans is not so new. In the past, the center of the possessions of the French kings in a new light, and now the largest city, port in the south of the United States.

America of the seventies. On the banks of the Mississippi

8.0 1976
Paradise Now

At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressionist colouring 'injected' by electronic means, this emerges as a hypnotic transmutation of a theatrical event into poetic cinema, capturing the ambiance and frenzy of the original. No documentary record could have done it justice.

Paradise Now

5.0 1970
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society

Filmed in 16mm during 1978 - to highlight the sophisticated social, medical, educational infrastructure that the PLO built during the 70ies in the refugee camps in Lebanon. The documentary is a cinematographic testimony of the Palestinian effort to build a secular and pluralistic society, based on the participation of the people and thus strengthening their feeling of national identity and dignity. PRCS was shot in practically all the Camps in Lebanon, from Nahar el Bared in the North to Rashidiye in the South, from Nabatiye to Beirut - Sabra, Shatila and Burj-el-Barajneh. Among the personalities in the film are Abu Ammar (Yasser Arafat), Dr. Fathi Arafat (President of PRCS), Dr. Sait Dajani, Yusuf Iraki, Abdelaziz Labadi.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society

NR 1979
Fuck Off! Images from Finland

F*** Off! shows no false respect towards the authorities in its impudent and candid reportage of the developing country/welfare state Finland. It is a cinematic parallel to Donner's New Book of Our Land (1967). The travelogue focuses especially on Finland's outsiders, low-paid workers and the unemployed. In desolate provinces, the inhabitants of a cold and barren country either humbly abide their fate, choose to move to Sweden or take refuge in excessive drinking. These images are accompanied by protest songs based on Donner's own prose and the lyrics of poet Jarkko Laine. Perkele is embodied in big business and the political elite.The jagged (anti)aesthetics of the film correspond to the underground movement and the radical politics of the time. The camera agilely penetrates everyday life. Though opposed to censorship, Fuck Off! itself transgresses the boundaries of privacy.

Fuck Off! Images from Finland

5.7 1971
Grève à Jeune Afrique

After two months of a hard-fought strike, accompanied by a day-and-night occupation of the premises, Jeune Afrique's workers were the victims of a court order authorizing their CEO, Bechir Ben Yahmed, to have them removed by the police. If they resisted, they risked falling foul of the law against rioters. To avoid the African comrades being deported from France, the strikers decided to leave. But before leaving, they organized a demonstration of solidarity with hundreds of journalists from the traditional and revolutionary press.

Grève à Jeune Afrique

NR 1972
The Slightest Gesture

Writer and pedagogue Fernand Deligny influenced a number of artists and French intellectuals. His work on autism influenced Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the rhizome. Francois Truffaut turned to his ideas to complete Les 400 Coups. Throughout the film Deligny plays with the possibilities of the camera to live and think closer to the human subject, offering with Le Moindre Geste a unique film to the world, one of most fascinating in French cinema. Situated [visually] between mountain western and integral neorealism, the film tells the story of two teenagers, escaped prisoners of an asylum, running away through the Cevennes.

The Slightest Gesture

7.0 1971
Everything Everywhere Again Alive

In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract. A landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones.

Everything Everywhere Again Alive

8.0 1975
Under the Protection of the State

The film was shot in an old, decrepit building where dozens of guest-workers' families live. The owner, a local influential politician, has avoided paying for the maintenance of the building under the legal standards by using his connections to proclaim the building a national cultural heritage. However, the rent he has been charging was as if the building were an object that offered standard comfort. The only German tenant takes the crew around and speaks of his battle against the landlord’s manipulation.

Under the Protection of the State

NR 1975
Ed Kelly and the Fighting 47th

An investigative documentary that focuses on political activities in the 47th Ward of Chicago and on the relationship between party politics and the park district. Originally aired on local Chicago news station WBBM-TV in 1979, the documentary details machine politics, patronage, clientelism and bribery that ran rife in Chicago's 47th Ward under the helm of Democratic Party Committeeman Ed Kelly. The digitization of this program was made possible by a grant from The Brinson Foundation.

Ed Kelly and the Fighting 47th

NR 1979
Possum Trot: The Life and Work of Calvin Black, 1903-1972

Calvin Black was a folk artist who lived in California's Mojave Desert and created more than 80 life-size female dolls, each with its own personality, function, and costume. He also built the "Bird Cage Theater," where the dolls perform and sing in voices recorded by the artist. The film works on two levels. One is the documentation of the artist's legacy and commentary on women: grotesque female figures moving in the desert wind and the theater with its frozen "actresses," protected by his widow from a world she views as hostile. The other is the re-creation of the artist's vision through the magic of film, as the camera enables the dolls to move and sing and brings theater to life as the artist imagined it.

Possum Trot: The Life and Work of Calvin Black, 1903-1972

NR 1977