Co-Presented by <a href="https://www.arabfilm.ca/" target="_blank"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/7612fed786d797e30081f55fa4fd3ed8.png" width="80" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;"></a> <a href="https://www.canadianarabinstitute.org/" target="_blank"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/fe10083b1dda715f91dabac756cbcc6f.png" width="265"></a>

Sebastia, a small archaeological town that sits on top of a hill Northwest of Nablus, is surrounded by Shavei Shomron, an illegal Israeli settlement and the confiscated agricultural fields of olive groves and apricot trees. This ancient site was excavated multiple times over the last century by colonial archaeologists funded by Zionist individuals and institutions. The first excavation of 1908 led by Harvard University took advantage of Sebastia locals including women, men, and children as cheap labor digging their own land for the sake of biblical archaeology. Each excavation extracted soil and artifacts from the ground, taking what they considered valuable to their home institutions and leaving pottery shards and rubble on the surface. Today, what’s left of the archaeological monuments is contested by the nearby settlement as well as the Israeli military. The Roman Forum is a battlefield, but the locals are incredibly resilient.

Sebastia

Every morning, on a highway in the middle of the desert, Jamel waits for a ride to go to work. Ghadeer gets up before dawn to make bread and prepare breakfast for her five children. They live in a shack rather than the tent their ancestors used to live in. A part of the Bedouin minority lives between Jerusalem and Jericho in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank in Israel.A proud people who try to remain solid and united despite the radical change of their life. Palestinian Bedouin communities suffer particularly from the loss of their identity, forced to remain locked down in that territory and to become sedentary.And for this reason, poverty, degradation and domestic violence were born.The film is a unique testimony and tells the life of a community that normally has no voice, reporting the point of view of those who are considered to be second class citizens, last among the lasts. Boston Palestine Film Festival 2020 - Winner Audience Award

They Were Nomads

"I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded Indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1967." Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with Emmaus, a village cited in the bible. Imwas is erased and Emmaus marked a religious touristic site in the park, a self-fulfilled scriptural and algorithmic prophecy. The park is located between what is commonly known as No Man’s Land and Jerusalem. The film explores this absurd space of suspension to create a counter mythology of this place against the religious, geopolitical and capitalist forces that actuated their imaginings on Palestine, people and land by reinserting the few images documenting the March of Return to Latroun that took place on June 16, 2007. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere here, where colonialism no longer makes sense. I wake up again, feet on the ground in so called Canada; another park, Iroquois Mohawk territory. I walk on snow to fall unto the desert.

Canada Park

A young boy is deprived of his innocence upon realizing his role model is being consumed by a tragedy. Now he must decide whether to confront his concerns or give in to social state of affairs.

Toronto Palestine Film Festival

On This Land: Shorts Program