Once I Entered a Garden begins from a dream that Avi Mograbi had. It’s 1920, Avi and his grandfather Ibrahim are standing outside their family home in Damascus. Ibrahim tells Avi that the family have decided to move from Damascus for Tel Aviv, and Avi replies to him that he would like to stay “and look after the house”. Upon waking, the filmmaker wonders what language they might have spoken, his grandfather had yet to learn Hebrew, while Avi’s Arabic is rudimentary. Staged as the pre-production for a film, under the guise of looking for the locations for these ‘lost’ geographies, Once I Entered a Garden explores poetically, the possibility of that rêverie, with the complicity of Ali al-Azhari, Avi’s Arabic teacher and friend, a Palestinian from Saffuriyya (near Nazareth), who has spent most of his adult life in Tel-Aviv. Al-Azhari’s young daughter Yasmin, whose father is Palestinian and mother Israeli, is the third protagonist of the film. As the film unravels, a lapsed geography of communal co-existence emerges with humor and tenderness. That which seems unimaginable becomes effortlessly real, like secret gardens hidden within.

Israeli filmmaker and video artist Avi Mograbi was born in 1956 in Tel Aviv, where he lives and works to this day. Having studied art and philosophy, he gained his first production experience working as an assistant director on commercials and feature films, while his own filmmaking career began in 1989. Since 1999, he has taught documentary and experimental film at Tel Aviv University and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Mograbi, one of Israel’s most distinguished filmmakers, is known for his unwavering commitment to social, cultural and political justice in the Middle East, as well as his experimental and innovative contribution to cinematic language. As an engaged filmmaker, he is actively involved in Breaking the Silence, an organization dedicated to collecting the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied Palestinian territories. His filmography includes the feature-length documentaries, Between Fences (2016), Once I Entered a Garden (2012), Z32 (2008), Avenge but One of My Two Eyes (2005), August (2002), Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi (1999) and How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997), The Reconstruction (1994).

Time races and stands still like a treadmill of false hope in Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. Ubiquitous arrows pointing nowhere direct the viewer to the unsettling truth: the residents of the camp seem to be going every which way but out. Palestinian refugees have lived in Lebanon without any basic civil rights, hanging eternally between a vanquished past and an infinitely receding future. Shot with the patience and grace of one who clearly understands the temporal horizon of waiting, this film brilliantly evokes the predicament of the Palestinian refugee perhaps better than any other.

Maher Abi Samra was born in Beirut in 1965. He studied Drama Arts at the Lebanese University in Beirut and Audio-Visual Studies at the Institut National de l’Image et du Son, in Paris, and has worked as a photo-journalist for Lebanese dailies, and international agencies. He worked as assistant director before directing several documentary films among which Chronicle of Returning (1994), Aging on Sea Waves (1995), Women of Hizballah (2000), Being in Palestine (2001, co-director). From 1998 to 2001 he worked on a documentary project Les Habitants de l'Hôpital de Chatila before directing Roundabout Shatila in 2004 (Ulysse Award for best documentary at Cinemed). In 2007, he directed Merely A Smell, that earned the Golden Dove for best short film at DOK Leipzig and Best short film award at It's All True International Documentary Film Festival (Brazil). Then he directed We Were Communists (2010), a documentary long feature winner of the Black Pearl for Best Arab Documentary at Abu Dhabi Film Festival and selected in competition at La Biennale di Venezzia. His most recent documentary, A Maid for Each (2016) premiered at the Berlinale.

For the first time, Mais Darwazah returns to her country of birth, Palestine. Leaving the country where she had found a refuge, she follows a lover she has never met, Palestinian artist Hasan Hourani, who reveals to her a wonderful and utopian universe. Fairy tales and reality are woven together to provide the material for this poetic documentary, questioning the elusive nature of place and the necessity of believing in our dreams.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Mais Darwazah.

Mais Darwazah is a Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian filmmaker who throughout the Arab world. She started making short experimental films: It Wasn’t a Question of Olives (2001), The Human Puppet (2005), Still Waiting (2007) and Aisha’s Journey (2009). After finishing her undergraduate degree in Interior Architecture from Kingston University (UK, 1997), she received the Chevening scholarship to complete an MA in Documentary Directing at Edinburgh College of Art (UK, 2007). Her graduation film Take Me Home (54’, 2008), was screened in numerous international film festivals. Her first feature-length documentary My Love Awaits Me by the Sea, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received several regional and International Awards. She currently teaches film writing and is developing her next feature film on the theme of violence. 

In June 2011, Pablo Picasso’s iconic work Buste de Femme (1943, part of the Van Abbemuseum collection) undertook a journey from Eindhoven to Ramallah, where it was exhibited for three weeks. Preceding this border-crossing loan agreement were two years of extensive research and negotiations in the legal, artistic and administrative fields. Khaled Hourani, a Palestinian artist living and working in Ramallah, was at the time, the artistic director of the International Academy of Art Palestine, where Buste de Femme was exhibited. A special room was constructed in the space of the Academy, to secure the required climactic conditions for the painting. The negotiations, transport and exhibition of Picasso’s Buste de Femme and documentation of the entire process constitute the art work Picasso in Palestine, imagined and undertaken by Khaled Hourani. Picasso in Palestine raises myriad questions about the recognition of Palestine as an independent and sovereign state by structures of the global economy (insurance companies, shipping companies, etc.) and foregrounds the mechanics of the on-going Israeli occupation. It also raises questions about systems of control, access to knowledge, museography, the value and funding of art and the role of the media.

Khaled Hourani was born in Hebron in 1965, he is an artist, curator and educator who lives and works in Ramallah. He is the co-founder of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and the initiator of the 2011 Picasso in Palestine project. The school borrowed and exhibited Picasso’s Buste de Femme, 1943, from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, exhibiting it in Ramallah and documenting the first time that such a Modernist masterpiece had made such a journey. He has curated and organized several exhibitions such as the Young Artist of the Year Award in 2000 and 2002, for the A.M. Qattan Foundation. He was the curator of the Palestinian pavilion for the São Paolo Biennal, in Brazil, in 2004, and the 21st Alexandria Biennale, in Egypt, in 2001. He also served as an Artistic Advisor for Liminal Spaces in 2006. He writes critically in the field of art and is an active member and founder of several cultural and art institutions. Recently he was awarded the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.

A conversation between Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmoui and Marseille-based artists Youri Cayron and Romain Rivalan around the idea of mapping real and lived worlds. The conversation will explore, amongst other themes, Marwan Rechmaoui’s UNRWA series, inspired by an ONG’s project of creating a “virtual Palestine” by connecting communities living in five Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

The results surface an unsuspected representation of the camps lived reality, while also reflecting the residents’ interests: children drew the homes of their friends, their school and playgrounds, mothers marked pharmacies, grocery shops, hospitals, teenage girls drew social clubs and schools while teenage boys market Internet cafés and video-game centers. Rechmaoui’s practice has often been interested in mapping urban spaces, in the UNRWA series he reproduces these maps in concrete, rice and sugar joute bags and corrugated metal, all materials that are hard to access in the camps.

Marwan Rechmaoui uses industrial materials such as concrete, rubber, tar and glass to create large scale tactile works. His works have primarily focused on local landmarks, such as A Monument for the Living, 2001, a replica of the Burj Al-Murr high-rise in downtown Beirut; never completed, the building served as a strategic military location during the Lebanese Civil War. A 2004 work, Beirut Caoutchouc, is composed of sixty pieces of rubber mats that fit together like a huge puzzle to make a complete map of Beirut. Rechmaoui’s work has been shown in exhibitions in Lebanon and abroad, including the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, France (2013); Serpentine Gallery, London (2012); Saatchi Gallery, London (2009); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2009); Musée d’art Contemporain de Nîmes, France (2008); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2008); São Paulo Bienal, Brazil (2006) and the Sharjah Biennial (2005).

Youri Cayron was born and grew up near Paris. After graduating from the École Supérieure d’Art de l’Agglomération d’Annecy (ESAAA), he moved to Marseille in 2008 to continue his work and develop his networks. In 2013 he created LIFT, an experimental artistic research and diffusion venue, where he has invited over 45 artists from diverse backgrounds to show their work. Cayron has been working as a duo with photographer Romain Rivalan since the summer 2013. Their first joint project, Cul de sac à ciel ouvert, looked at figures of travellers on the French Mediterranean coast. Romain Rivalan also lives in Marseille. Alongside his work as a stage manager in the performing arts, he has been pursuing his passion for argentic photography for over ten years.

Ma’aloul is a Palestinian village in Galilee. It was destroyed by the Israeli army in 1948, and its people were deported to Lebanon and to the neighbouring city of Nazareth. Since then, they have only been allowed to return to Ma’aloul once a year, for the anniversary of the State of Israel’s independence. On the site where their demolished village once stood, they organise a picnic.

Belgium-based Palestinian director Michel Khleifi worked for television and the radio before directing his first feature film, Fertile Memory, in 1980. He then made several films including Wedding in Galilee (1987), L’Ordre du Jour (1993), Tale of the Three Jewels (1996) and Zindeeq (2009).

An elderly Palestinian ‘Roma’ couple in a final standoff with the Israeli authorities to maintain their life in Roshmia, the last natural valley in Haifa. Yousef and his wife Amna, who are descendants of the Roma of Palestine, have lived alone in a shack since 1956 with serenity, far from the bustle of city life. When the Israeli authorities launch a new road construction plan and come to confiscate their land and demolish the shack, a friend of the couple tries to obtain a compensation from the municipality. Yousef refuses to leave his home, keeping his calm, while negotiations are on-going and tension grows among the three. In addition to the despairing prospect of uprooting, the couple seems also to be breaking apart.

Salim Abu Jabal worked as a journalist and film critic in different newspapers before pursuing a career in television and film production. He has directed several films, series and programs, his first feature Roshmia was awarded Special Jury Prize at the Dubai International Film Festival, Best Documentary, Open Eyes Award at the MedFilm Festival Rome, Grand Prize Documentary at the Festival International de Cinéma Tétouan, and the Special Jury Prize at Algeria International Cinema Festival. The film premiered at IDFA in 2015.

After the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli army rewarded Palestinians who ‘collaborated’ with them by giving them white Ford vans, so they would become a source of income. The vans were sold and converted to private taxi transport.  In Ford Transit, Hany Abu-Assad follows Raja’i, one of the drivers, who makes the journey between Ramallah and Jerusalem, negotiating roadblocks and checkpoints. The passengers are invariably a heterogeneous mix, but they also include celebrities such as politician Hana Ashrawi and filmmaker B.Z. Goldberg.

Hany Abu-Assad was born in Nazareth, Palestine in 1961. After having worked as an airplane engineer in The Netherlands for several years, Abu-Assad made the radical shift towards film, and produced the feature film Curfew, directed by Rashid Masharawi, in 1994. In 1998 he directed his first feature, The Fourteenth Chick, based on a script by writer Arnon Grunberg, followed by the documentary Nazareth 2000 (2000), next was his second feature Rana's Wedding (2002) and his second documentary Ford Transit (2002). In 2006, his nexy feature, Paradise Now, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film in that year. In 2011 Abu-Assad finished working on The Courier, a Hollywood movie starring Jeffery Dean Morgan, Til Schweiger and Mickey Rourke, and in 2013 he finished working on Omar, that won the Jury Prize in the competition of Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (OSCARS) for Best Foreign Language Film 2014 and won the Best Film at the Dubai Film Festival. In 2015 Abu-Assad completed his 6^th feature film The Idol a drama inspired by the incredible journey of the artist Mohammad Assaf, a singer from Gaza who won the Arab Idol show in 2013.

Visual artist Vera Tamari lives and works in Ramallah. With curator Yazid Anani, she will discuss the questions and themes that have underpinned her practice for the past forty years. 

Born in Jerusalem, Vera Tamari is a visual artist, historian of Islamic art, art educator and curator. She received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Beirut College for Women (now Lebanese American University) in 1966. She specialized in ceramics at the Istituto Statale d’Arte per la Ceramica in Florence, in 1974 and obtained a masters degree in Islamic Art and Architecture from the University of Oxford in 1984. She served for more than two decades as professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and Art History at Birzeit University, where she also founded and directed the Virtual Gallery and the Birzeit University Museum between 2005 and 2010. There she conceived the Cities Exhibition series, curating and co-curating three of its editions (2009-2012). Tamari is actively involved in the promotion of art and culture in Palestine and serves as advisor and member to numerous institutions and cultural boards namely for Riwaq and is a member of the Academic Committee at the International Art Academy –Palestine. She served as jury member for YAYA (Young Artists Award organized by the Abdel Muhsin Qattan Foundation) and AFAC (Arab Foundation for Art and Culture). As an artist she specializes in ceramic sculpture and conceptual art and has exhibited widely since 1974 in Palestine, the Arab World, Europe, the UK, Japan and the USA.

The Gaza strip claimed some 12 cinemas since 1944 but by 1987, with the Israeli occupation and armed conflicts, they were all destroyed. In 1994, a new cinema was inaugurated, but it was burned down that same year. The film reflects on the social life of cinema, giving voice to the generation that remembers the joy of watching films in theaters and the younger generation that has been deprived of it.

Followed by a conversation between Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser and May Odeh.

Born in Gaza, Khalil Al-Mozian studied film directing in Saint-Petersburg in Russia. He has directed several documentaries for television broadcast, as well as short fiction films, including Mashoo Matook (2010), and a feature Sara (2014).

May Odeh is a director and producer. She has directed several films including Searching for Napoleon (2006), Diaries (2011) and Drawing for Better Dreams (2015). She has a produced the short fiction film Izriqaq (2013), Unknown Soldiers (2014) and Roshmia (2014). Recently she founded her own company, Odeh Films and is in production for the feature length documentary, The Forgotten, directed by Ghada Terawi and she is developing 200 Meters, a narrative feature directed by Ameen Nayfeh.

Tarzan et Arab Nasser are artists, filmmakers and twin brothers from Gaza (their real names are Ahmed and Mohamed Abu Nasser). They were born in 1988, a year after the closure of the last cinemas in Gaza. They pursued their passion for film directing by collaborating with Khalil Al-Mozain, another Gazan filmmaker for four years. In 2010, Tarzan and Arab received the prestigious award of the A.M. Qattan Foundation for their short film, Colorful Journey and for their conceptual art project, Gaza Wood, a collection of posters where Hollywood films are represented as names for Israeli military operations on Gaza. They shot their first short film, Condom Lead in 2013, the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, their first feature, Dégradé, made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week.