The Buenos Aires Palestinian Film Festival
Following in the footsteps of other Palestinian international film festivals in London, Boston, Madrid and Santiago, the purpose of the Buenos Aires Festival is to engage Latin American audiences with filmic depictions of Palestinian history and cultures.
“The aesthetic roots of Palestinian cinema are deeply embedded in the history of Palestinian dispossession, political fragmentation, exilic experiences, and diasporic longings... Palestinian cinema as a result is the meandering topography of a nation dreaming and interpreting its dreams in open-ended, contingent, and yet enabling gestures”
The Center for Palestine Studies presented its first Palestinian Film Festival in Buenos Aries, Argentina. The festival, August 13-19, 2015 featured iconic works from Palestinian cinema, which has emerged as a globally influential artistic force.
The program included the screening of four feature films and three short films, with subtitles in Spanish, together with a series of lectures by special guest Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Professor Dabashi is a renowned film expert, and the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, which is dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian cinema. Dabashi has organized Palestinian film festivals both in Palestine and the United States and is on the advisory board of a number of other Palestinian film festivals worldwide. His edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema was the first major multi-author treatment of the subject.
Cosponsors
Programa Sur Global at Univeridad Nacional de San Martin, in collaboration with Buenos Aires Mon Amour (BAMA)
Centro Cultural de la Cooperacion Floreal Gorini.