Palestine Film Institute Returns To Sheffield DocFest With Slate

EXCLUSIVE: The Palestine Film Institute (PFI) has set the lineup of filmmakers and work-in-progress projects that it will present this year as part of its annual showcase at Sheffield DocFest.

Presented in collaboration with Sheffield DocFest and supported by the British Council, the PFI Showcase takes place on 13 June at 10:00 BST at the Creative Lounge, Workstation. The selected projects are:

Synopsis: As the filmmaker’s father – a prominent Palestinian political leader from the Galilee – is convicted of “incitement to violence and terrorism”, his daughter begins filming, capturing family life and resistance before the Israeli state possibly returns him to prison.

 > Director Safaa Khatib and Producers May Jabareen & María Eugenia Lombardi will be in attendance. 

Synopsis: A Palestinian journalist at Columbia University must navigate the tension between objectivity and identity as she documents a student movement that mirrors her own struggle for truth and belonging.

> Director Gaia Caramazza and Producer Sanjna Selva will be in attendance

Unboxing Gaza 

Synopsis: A Palestinian artist discovers his grandfather’s forgotten photo archive from 1940s Gaza. What begins as a family heirloom becomes a fight to preserve the memory of a place on the brink of erasure.

> Director Marta Miskaryan and Producer Alice Hughes will be in attendance

Filmmaker and educator Saeed Taji Farouky, a member of the PFI, will be at Sheffield with the delegation. Farouky said the Institute’s delegation to Sheffield “always has special resonance because of the city’s history of radical and popular mobilisation for justice and liberation.”

“Sheffield is the perfect partner to build up the Palestinian film industry with us, to find opportunities for these phenomenal filmmakers on an international scale, and to showcase the incomparable talent of Palestinian artists,” Farouky said. 

Outside of the PFI’s showcase, several other Palestinian projects will be at Sheffield. Yasmin Fedda’s To Make Things Grow has been selected for the festival’s MeetMarket, while completed Palestinian feature films in the festival programme include:

Life Support — World Premiere

Director: Daniele Rugo
Countries: United Kingdom, Palestine, Qatar

A group of international doctors breach the blockade of Gaza. What they find is the calculated dismantling of life itself.

Life Support is playing in the Tim Hetherington competition and will be released in cinemas on 10th July.

Landscapes of Memory — International Premiere

Director: Leah Galant
Countries: USA, Germany

An American filmmaker travels to Berlin to confront her family’s Holocaust history, only to be detained at a pro-Palestinian demonstration and charged with antisemitism.

American Doctor — UK Premiere

Director: Poh Si Teng
Countries: USA, Palestine, Qatar, Malaysia

Three American doctors volunteer in Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals. The humanitarian catastrophe they witness compels them to carry their fight far beyond the wards and back to Washington.

Sheffield DocFest runs from June 10 to 15.