{"id":342361,"date":"2018-01-04T18:02:57","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T17:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/an-interview-with-palestinian-filmmaker-mahdi-fleifel-a-film-is-like-a-historical-document-it-should-be-solid-enough-to-endure\/"},"modified":"2018-01-04T18:02:57","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T17:02:57","slug":"an-interview-with-palestinian-filmmaker-mahdi-fleifel-a-film-is-like-a-historical-document-it-should-be-solid-enough-to-endure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/an-interview-with-palestinian-filmmaker-mahdi-fleifel-a-film-is-like-a-historical-document-it-should-be-solid-enough-to-endure\/","title":{"rendered":"An interview with Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel: \u201cA film is like a historical document, it should be solid enough to endure\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h4>Director of <em>A World Not Ours<\/em>, <em>A Man Returned<\/em> and <em>A Drowning Man<\/em><\/h4>\n<h2>An interview with Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel: \u201cA film is like a historical document, it should be solid enough to endure\u201d<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    By<br \/>\n    David Walsh<br \/>\n    <br \/>4 January 2018<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>Mahdi Fleifel is a Danish-Palestinian filmmaker, whose feature film <em>A World Not Ours<\/em> premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012. We <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2012\/09\/tff2-s26.html\">commented<\/a> on the remarkable work and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2012\/09\/tint-s26.html\">interviewed<\/a> Fleifel at the time.<\/p>\n<p>His short film, <em>A Drowning Man<\/em>, was selected for the official competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2017\/09\/26\/tff2-s26.html\">screened<\/a> in Toronto at last year\u2019s festival.<\/p>\n<p>Fleifel\u2019s grandparents were driven out of their village by the Israelis in 1948, and eventually settled in the Ain El-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The future filmmaker was born in Dubai in 1979, where his father had moved for employment. The family moved to Denmark in 1988.<\/p>\n<div class=\"imageFull\" style=\"width:480px; oveflow:hidden;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/asset\/8091fdb3-d8fe-4251-af50-8437add2d9fJ\/image.jpg?rendition=image480\"  width=\"480\" style=\"width:480px;\" \/><span><em>A Drowning Man<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<p><em>A World Not Ours<\/em> is both a personal memoir and a tracing out of the Palestinian condition. In a lively and even entertaining fashion, the director edited and shaped an enormous quantity of film and video footage shot by his father and Fleifel himself over the course of several decades. The final product recounts his family\u2019s experience, the general experience of Ain El-Hilweh and the fate of three individuals in particular, Fleifel\u2019s grandfather, his uncle Said (actually, his grandfather\u2019s half-brother) and his good friend, Abu Eyad (named after the murdered PLO intelligence chief), a former Fatah fighter.<\/p>\n<p><em>A World Not Ours<\/em> deservedly won more than 30 awards, including the Peace Film Prize at the 2013 Berlinale and the Edinburgh, Yamagata and DOC NYC Grand Jury Prizes.<\/p>\n<p>Fleifel\u2019s 12-minute film, <em>Xenos<\/em> ( <em>Stranger<\/em>, 2014), follows Abu Eyad and other young&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2018\/01\/04\/pale-j04.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Director of A World Not Ours, A Man Returned and A Drowning Man An interview with Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel: \u201cA film is like a historical document, it should be solid enough to endure\u201d By David Walsh 4 January 2018 Mahdi Fleifel is a Danish-Palestinian filmmaker, whose feature film A World Not Ours premiered [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-342361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}