"One Cinema Town" in THE PEACOCK: The Prof (26 November 2019)

I ask about the fading film posters on the wall: one from Mardon Wali Baat (1988) and the other from Aag Hi Aag (1987), surprised to see these Bollywood artefacts so far away from their origins. Rania Elias, director of the Yabous Cultural Centre tells me during my visit in June 2019 that they are remnants from more than 25 years ago, Indian films being popular at the cinema then. The dates of the posters coincide with the closure of Al Quds Cinema, which only reopened at Yabous in 2012.

It is the only cinema in Occupied Palestine’s East Jerusalem.

I tried to imagine what it meant for a community not to have a cinema for 25 years, films being so integral to public culture, the material of everyday conversations, a medium that ignites the imagination.

 “Built in the 1950s, the popular East Jerusalem cinema once held up to 800 persons and screened commercial films from the region and around the world until the Israeli authorities closed it in 1987, at the start of the first Palestinian intifada,” The Electronic Intifada (20 February 2012) chronicles in an article about the relaunch of the institution.

Though for the intervening years between Al Quds’ closure and reopening there may have been no public space where films made by Palestinians could be viewed in community, cinema about and by Palestinians demonstrates a variety of forms and themes. 

At IFFI, this year, Elia Suleiman’s new comedy, It Must be Heaven, follows the journey of a man who leaves his native Palestine to seek opportunities elsewhere. Exile is a recurrent subject in Palestinian cinema, as is occupation. In Degradé (2015), twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser direct a story about thirteen Palestinian women trapped in a beauty salon in Gaza. 

Like East Jerusalem, Gaza too was sans community cinema for decades, meaning that the Nasser brothers, who are from there, would have grown up without it. The Independent (27 August 2017) reports that Gaza City’s Samer Cinema closed in the 1960s. It wasn’t till 2017 that Gazans could watch a film in a cinema for the first time in the 21^st century. The first screening held there was the premier of Ten Years, a feature about Palestinians in Israeli prisons. 

Palestinian filmmakers exercise their art under trying circumstances. The Israel-born Palestinian director of Paradise Now (2005), Hany Abu-Assad, “was reportedly threatened by both sides in the conflict,” Roger Ebert writes in his review of the film about suicide bombers, curiously adding that “the film is dangerous because of its objectivity…”

Currently on the film festival circuit, Palestinian American director Alia Yunis’ documentary The Golden Harvest tracks the cultural legacy of olive oil. Though the documentary takes one through Italy, Greece, Spain, and Israel, its heart is in Palestine. In an interview with The National (7 April 2019), a news source from Abu Dhabi where Yunis resides, she muses, “My dad was born in Palestine and so was olive oil.” A tribute to her father’s memory, the film is also about olive trees as markers of Palestinian heritage, especially in contested lands. Yunis remarks, “The olive tree is exceptional … and ultimately, for the owners of the trees, proof of existence … But all plants connect us to the ground beneath us, and understanding that gives us roots to grow, too.”

A similar thought occurs to me about cinema, which is a site of representation and collective memory. Al Quds Cinema in East Jerusalem may be the only one, but it is more than just one of a kind.

From The Peacock.

Addendum: Rania Elias noted in an email to me that the original owners of Al Quds closed the cinema down out of concern "due to the political situation and the first uprising."