Short Films for a Free Palestine
FICBUEUBUEU, Pontevedra. May 29, 2024. One of the short films tells the story of Layla, a girl who imagines her native Palestine from the refugee camp where she lives abroad. In another short film, the elderly Oum Amin virtually revisits the city of Haifa in Gaza, where she was born and raised before the Israeli occupation. These are the plots of two of the five Palestinian short films that FICBUEU will screen on Thursday, June 13 at the Centro Social do Mar in Bueu (8:30 PM).
All proceeds will be donated to the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, which provides healthcare to the population of the Gaza Strip. Tickets for this charity event are priced at 3 euros and are available for purchase on the FICBUEU website. Additionally, from the same online store where the charity tickets are sold, those who wish to do so can also make a donation even if they are not attending. There will be a product specifically for donations: people can choose how much money they want to donate to support the victims in Gaza, even if they are not attending the screening.
The Bueu International Film Festival (FICBUEU) decided, in response to the invasion of Gaza, to exclude from its next edition any film that received public funding from Israel or any public or private entity that supports the genocide of the Palestinian people. FICBUEU will celebrate its 17th edition from September 6 to 21. As every year, short films from around the world will compete in its official section.
For the charity session of Palestinian short films on June 13, the Compostela-based cooperative Numax was responsible for the selection of the works, facilitating the logistics of the copies, and subtitling the shorts into Galician. The anthology was created from the catalog of Another Gaze, a digital and print information platform focused on cinema and feminism, which is also part of the project through which FICBUEU has organized this charity session since its inception.
Five Palestinian perspectives
Four of the shorts that will be screened are productions from the last decade.
Road to Palestine is from 1985. Directed by Layaly Badr, it tells the story of a girl named Layla: she arrived at the refugee camp after being wounded in an Israeli bombing in Gaza that killed her father. She and her friends in the camp imagine what their unknown country will be like.
In The White Elephant (2018), Shuruq Harb portrays a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s using Israeli pop culture as a mirror. The film uses images shared online by Israeli soldiers during the Gulf War, the First Intifada, and trance music gatherings.
Your Father Was Born a 100 Years Old, And So Was the Nakba, directed by Razan AlSalah in 2017, tells the story of the elderly Oum Amin virtually exploring her native Haifa. The film was released in 2017.
The Silent Protest: Jerusalem 1929 was directed by Mahasen Nasser-Eldin in 2019. It revives the history of a mobilization led by 300 women from across Palestine who went to Jerusalem in 1929 to protest against the British High Commissioner of the time.
The program is completed by Electrical Gaza (2015). In this film, director Rosalind Nashashibi depicts the Gaza Strip as a myth: isolated, timeless, almost inaccessible, and extremely tense.
