Revolution until victory: the 24th Chicago Palestine Film Festival

On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student of Palestinian descent, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and taken, as we now know, to a detention center in Louisiana. A lawful permanent resident, Khalil nevertheless faces deportation for what the Department of Homeland Security posted on X (formerly Twitter) were “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” 

It’d be impossible to write about the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, now in its 24th year, and not reckon with the current moment. (As of publication, Israel has again launched aerial attacks across the Gaza strip, killing more than 400 Palestinians.) Taking place between April 12–26 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the festival’s lineup spans the past and the present in such a way that they seem sadly indistinguishable, though awareness and education around both is crucial to what hopefully could be a peaceful future.

Especially prescient in the festival’s slate considering Khalil’s arrest is Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth’s documentary The Palestine Exception (2024), screening Saturday, April 19, at 1 PM, preceded like all the feature screenings by a few short films and followed by a Q&A. It’s a film about the ways in which criticism of Israel is still verboten on many college campuses, spaces where free speech and political activism are often promulgated as ideological tenets. At just over an hour, it’s an impressively concise overview of what began after October 7, 2023, when a new McCarthyism emerged in response to robust protests on college campuses across the United States. 

“Even though we can bash [the] countries of China and Russia, Saudi Arabia, not being accused of being anti-Buddhist or anti-Orthodox, anti-Muslim,” says Theodore Khoury, a professor of management and strategy at Portland State University (one among 60 academic institutions recently warned by the U.S. Department of Education that they could face repercussions for “failing to protect Jewish students on campus”), “you have this exception of anything you say in favor of Palestine is construed as being anti-Semitic,” getting at the reason for the title of Haaken and Ruth’s film.

One definition of exception has it as being “a person or thing that is excluded from a general statement or does not follow a rule.” There’s the Palestine exception as mentioned previously, and also the use of it in Spaces of Exception (2023), the end result of a yearslong multimedia project by filmmakers Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny. Their documentary examines two such spaces, Native reservations and Palestinian refugee camps, several of which they visit in the film. It’s a natural comparison, the struggle of these two Indigenous groups (as an activist talking point, it’s raised also in The Palestine Exception). “An important link in the project is how territory frames the ideas of sovereignty in both struggles,” the filmmakers said in an interview on the blog for PM Press (with whom they published the book The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival). “For most of the indigenous nations located territorially inside the borders of the United States, a land base is an essential component of their articulation of sovereignty—being politically, socially, economically, and spiritually outside the American system of governance—and the reservation is often the official articulation or potential starting point of such a land-base. . . . The Palestinian camps, on the other hand, are the spatial embodiment of a form of sovereignty rooted in refugeehood. It is refugeehood itself that is the threat, because it upends the sanctity of the State of Israel by calling attention to the ethnic cleansing that made that state possible in the first place.”

The 24th Chicago Palestine Film Festival
Sat 4/12–Sat 4/26, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $13 general admission, $8 students and youth, $6 Film Center members, $5 SAIC students and faculty, and staff of the Art Institute, palestinefilmfest.com

Many of the documentaries I watched that are playing in the festival, including The Palestine Exception, provide accessible overviews of the ongoing conflict; my favorite is Revolution Until Victory AKA We are the Palestinian People (1972), screening Thursday, April 17, at 6:15 PM, made by Pacific Newsreel, described as a breakaway faction of the Newsreel, a radical New York City filmmaking collective. A mix of archival footage and on-the-ground reportage, the film covers the founding of Zionism, the impact of British imperialism, the proclamation of the Jewish state, the Nakba in 1948, and the establishment of the Palestinian liberation movement, among other key points in this ongoing contention. It resounds now as it must have then as being an especially radical document of a neglected history; it’s also symbolic as a consequential token of resistance from a bygone era, spurring hope that such momentum can be maintained.

The opening-night film screening on Saturday, April 12, Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi’s A State of Passion (2024), is sold out. I hope it might find its way back to the big screen here in Chicago, as it’s an achingly beautiful portrait of British Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who’s been providing medical aid during conflicts in Palestine since the First Intifada in 1987 and has emerged during the recent war as a face of both resilience and revolution. At the start of the most recent war, he worked tirelessly for 43 days, not just tending to victims but also making the world aware of the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people. (He later went on to provide evidence to the international criminal court in the Hague.) Some images and footage within the film are the definition of “hard to watch,” but perhaps necessary to understanding the direness for those being attacked. Conflicts abroad can sometimes feel abstract—shocking as the numbers may be, they are just that, symbols rather than flesh (absolutely a privilege for those of us not experiencing the terror)—and this helps to realize the recondite. Also interesting are the insights into Abu-Sittah’s homelife as a plastic surgeon with his wife and three kids back in London. 

Where the above-mentioned documentaries provide clarity in their straightforwardness, Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film (2024) is more experimental, giving new meaning and gravitas to the concept of found footage. With footage culled from a Palestine Liberation Organization archive that was stolen by the Israel Defense Forces during the First Lebanon War in 1982 and inspired by the writings of Palestinian writer and politician Ghassan Kanafani, Aljafari makes slight “interventions,” as he calls them, in the way of additive swaths of color and motifs, such as flames being appended to certain sequences. In an interview with Filmmaker magazine, Aljafari noted that “[t]he dangerous thing about using already-existing material is that it has its own narrative, its own gaze and power. What I do is basically turn the image against itself. And so, the interventions were a necessary thing to do,” explaining his own appropriation of already appropriated material, a new intimacy born of creative distancing.

Other documentaries playing include Leonardo Antonio Avezzano’s The Promise (2022), about a man, who, after his Palestinian father dies, fulfills his promise to him to scale Mount Everest, and Areeb Zuaiter’s documentary Yalla Parkour (2024), in which the filmmaker returns to Gaza to seek out a group of men she saw practicing parkour in a video on the Internet, the sport becoming an expression of freedom. They screen on Sunday, April 13, at 4 PM and Saturday, April 19, at 6 PM, respectively. There are also two programs of short films, Solidarity & Promise on Sunday, April 13, at 1 PM and Chicago to Palestine on Wednesday, April 16, at 6 PM. 

There’s one narrative film, Danish Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown (2024), described as a loose adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novella Men in the Sun—the same writer who inspired A Fidai Film—and an extension of Fleifel’s 2012 documentary A World Not Ours, which ends with its subjects in Greece, where To a Land Unknown picks up. The protagonists, refugee cousins who went to Athens from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, carry out petty crimes in order to save for fake passports so that they can get to Germany; one of the cousins blows their money on his drug addiction, resulting in them undertaking a risky heist in which they must pose as smugglers. It was the only Palestinian film to be screened across all sections of last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The closing night film on Saturday, April 26 at 7 PM, Mohammad Bakri’s Janin, Jenin (2024), spans the past and the present more literally, as it’s the Palestinian actor and filmmaker’s follow-up to his 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin, about the Battle of Jenin that took place during the Second Intifada. The film was initially banned in Israel, and though that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel, it was later banned again after an Israeli soldier featured therein sued for defamation. Janin, Jenin covers this controversy and then revisits, in light of the latest war, the subjects 20-plus years later, older but no less resolved in their unwavering desire for liberation. This film reminds us that it’s not necessarily about past or present, but the continuum of catastrophe (the meaning of the word nakba) that befalls the Palestinian people and the resilience they exude in spite of it.