At Home, Palestinian Cinema Edition with Kaleem Hawa

The Film Comment Podcast

In an essay on the militant films of the Palestine Film Unit for The New York Review of Books, the critic Kaleem Hawa writes that, “Palestinian cinema has always been saddled with the psychic weight of colonization. (...) Film offers liberatory possibilities, then: with the projection of moving images onto a screen, a people can imagine something different, something other.” This week on the podcast, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Kaleem (who’s also a Film Comment contributor) to discuss our recent home-viewing—which, as it turned out, included a lot of Palestinian cinema. From the agit-prop of Mustafa Abu Ali’s 1974 film They Do Not Exist, to the diasporic longing of Basma AlSharif’s Home Movies Gaza, to the biting satire and media criticism of Elia Suleiman, our conversation covered a lot of fascinating ground. Links to the movies are in our show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-at-home-palestinian-cinema-edition/.