The San Diego Arab Film Festival, presented by the nonprofit organization Karama, will showcase films over the next two weekends at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, with a pair of Palestinian documentaries bookending the festival.
This Friday's opening night program, featuring the Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land" has already sold out. The film just picked up the Academy Award for Best Documentary last month but still has not been distributed widely in U.S. cinemas. The film was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective. It shows the destruction occurring in the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta, and the friendship that develops between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.
Larry Christian is president of Karama and the film festival committee chair. He explained, "We really wanted to have opening night and closing night films from Palestine, and we were really attracted to the idea of having one of those be about Gaza, which is on everybody's mind all the time, but another one being on the West Bank and what's happening there because they're connected. We wanted to get that idea across with our choice of opening and closing films."
The closing night film is "A State of Passion," a feature-length documentary film by Palestinian-Lebanese filmmakers Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. As friends of British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, they knew firsthand of his efforts to work in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli hospitals, and their friendship prompted them to make this documentary.
Co-director Khalidi spoke to me from Lebanon at 1 a.m. her time. She described the film as "a story of Gaza told through an exceptional person, who is Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. This is not his first time in Gaza. This was not a scripted film. It was not even a planned film. But since we're close friends, every time Ghassan has been to Gaza, we've been in touch. We just knew that this film had to be made. We felt very pressured. We felt that this was our story, and we should be the ones telling it, not wait until some stranger comes from abroad, and that it needed to be told immediately. We didn't have the luxury of reflecting later on. That would be another story later when we reflect on what has happened. But there was something happening and is happening right now. We had the privilege of having a treasure, which is a close relationship and trust with someone on the ground. But also — and I hope other medics won't hate me — Ghassan has this ability that most surgeons don't, which is to see the bigger picture and to contextualize and to be articulate."
We see Ghassan working and exhausted, and we hear him articulate not just his extraordinary compassion for the victims he treats but also his assessment of the horrors he is witnessing.
"The reason we made the film," Khalidi explained, "is that we want people to listen. We want people to hear the story. We want people to become interested in learning more. It's a film. Films do not change the world, but they may open your eyes to push you to think, push you to be curious, push you to want to find out more, push you to learn. If we can achieve that, I think we'll be very, very happy."
These two documentaries are very much tied to current events, but one of the films that I loved goes back in time to a historical figure, Dr. Frantz Fanon, a Black French psychiatrist and intellectual from Martinique. The film bears a very lengthy title, "True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, When Dr. Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward Between 1953 and 1956." This gorgeous black-and-white film introduced me to a person I knew nothing about and served up a fascinating and multi-layered story.
"Frantz Fanon was a very important psychiatrist and intellectual, particularly during the times of the liberation movements in the '50s and the '60s," Christian explained. "He was a practicing psychiatrist, and he got hired to work at an institution in Algeria, where he got confronted with the differences from his own approach to treating patients, where his goal was to try to get the people in the institution to a point where they could reintegrate back in with their families and society. The French people who had been running (the institution) before just wanted to keep them hidden away. He also encountered the racism of the French rulers, who had a strict segregation between the French and the Arab patients and also towards him as a Black doctor. "
Currently, we're hearing people in the media describe empathy as a weakness, and this film is a compelling reminder of how important it is to have compassion and what that can do to change people's lives. Through Frantz's story, we also see how that lack of empathy is used as a tool by the French colonizers to dehumanize people.
"He wrote maybe his most famous book, 'The Wretched of the Earth,' which, among other things, that it addresses is the social and psychological effects of colonialism on the victims but also the role and effect of violence on the people there," Christian said. "Part of his argumentation is that when you look at the violence of the colonizer and the violence of the liberationists, you can't analyze those in the same terms because they're different phenomena and they affect the people who are involved in it in different ways. As I'm thinking about this film and about Frantz Fanon, it seems to me that it's very current."
Each feature film is accompanied by a short film that adds more diversity and countries to the festival's showcase.
Committee member Maha Gebara noted that this year there are quite a few female-centric films. She will be introducing one of those films, focusing on women, "Arzé," which screens on Saturday.
"'Arzé' is Lebanon's submission to the Oscars," Gebara said. "It's a story about a single mother called Arzé, and her teenage son, and they take us on this emotional ride as they try to survive in a collapsing Beirut. When their scooter — the one thing helping them get by — gets stolen, they're thrown into a journey across the city's divided neighborhoods. It's really good, actually. It's funny, intense and it's a real window into Lebanon's class and sectarian divides. I personally enjoyed it a lot."
And Gebara was born in Lebanon but left as a child in 1976 during the height of the Civil War.
One other attraction of the festival is food. Of the five nights of the festival, four will feature Palestinian food. But on Saturday, April 12, in honor of the Fanon film from Algiers and another from Tunisia, "Take My Breath," the festival will serve food from North Africa. All nights will offer a vegetarian and meat option.
I can't think of a better combination than food and film, so I hope you will seek out some of these movies and enjoy some food and culture from the Arab community.
