I was invited to the 12th Algiers International film festival to serve on the Jury of the Documentary competition.
My co-jurists are the famous German activist filmmaker Monica Maurer, who moved to Beirut in 1977 to work with the PLO’s Palestine Film Institute. Over the course of five years, she made six 16mm documentaries about and with the Palestinian resistance.
Today, she is dedicated to the preservation of the film and photographic archives of Palestine and the struggles she filmed, aware that the archive enables a political narrative of the present. The Monica Maurer Fund is kept in Rome by Aamod (Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement).
and Saleem Albeik, a Palestinian film critic, novelist, and cultural editor based in Paris. He has published six literary works, including his latest novel The Cock’s Eye(Hachette-Antoine-Nofel, 2022) and the novels Scenario (Al Ahlia, 2019), and Two Tickets to Saffuriyah (Al Saqi, 2017). His first book on cinema, Reflections on Palestinian Cinema, was published in 2023 by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing. He oversaw and edited the new edition of Palestine in Cinemaand wrote its introduction.
Albeik writes weekly film critiques for Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, edits Romman cultural magazine, and produces and presents the cultural news on Monte Carlo Doualiya radio. He is part of the programming teams for both the Palestine Cinema Days and Amman International Film Festival.
I also spoke on a panel ‘Cinema as an Act of Resistance’ about my under production documentary film ‘The Protest’.
