The Boston Palestine Film Festival

The Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) brings Palestine-related cinema, narratives, and culture to New England audiences.

The festival features compelling and thought-provoking films, including documentaries, features, rare early works, video art pieces, and new films by emerging artists and youth. These works from directors around the world offer refreshingly honest, self-described, and independent views of Palestine and its history, culture, and geographically dispersed society. Each year, guest filmmakers from various countries and expert commentators add contextual depth to the films.

Schedule:

12:30 p.m: Life Is Beautiful at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Documentary, 93 min
by Mohamed Jabaly
Life is Beautiful tells the story of how director Mohamed Jabaly fought for his rights as a Palestinian and a filmmaker, when stranded in Norway due to circumstances beyond his control. Through his personal archive and video calls, he shares his love and longing for his hometown, friends and family, as he tries to make a new life for himself in the arctic. The film is a love letter to Gaza, to his adopted hometown in Tromsø, and to the empowering force of storytelling.

3:00 p.m: Mawtini (My Homeland) at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Narrative Short, 19 min
by Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller
Grieving the loss of her grandmother, Nawal fixates on keeping a fig sapling alive, her last remaining connection to Palestine. When she meets Tanya, an older Indigenous woman and the resident trouble-maker in her new apartment building, she learns what resilience and connection to the land under colonialism and capitalism really means.

Aida Returns at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2023, Documentary, 88 min
by Carol Mansour
This is a sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, often absurd story of multiple journeys: the journey of loss as the director’s mother Aida struggled with Alzheimer’s disease finding solace in her repeated "returning" to the Yafa of her youth; the journey of losing a parent; and the ultimate return journey to Yafa where Aida would finally find rest. After her mother’s passing, director Carol Mansour, met friends in Beirut willing to carry Aida back with them to Palestine. The film accompanies Carol as she engineers a way to return her mother aided by an unlikely set of friends and strangers coming together to facilitate what should have been a simple journey. This journey is at the same time very private and yet universal. It is a tribute to the lost past of the director’s family, an attempt to restore part of both an individual and a collective memory, and a poetic nod and affirmation to all those exiled Palestinians forbidden from returning to their hometowns, even after death.