Author and Chair of the Department of Asia Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nadia Yaqub, will be presenting at talk entitled ‘Towards a Palestinian Third Cinema’. This talk will focus on the film-making of Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestinian Film Unit which was founded in 1968. Abu Ali’s works are analyzed in relation to Ici et Ailleurs by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gori, Anne-Marie Mieville, and The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War by Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu and contextualized within the concept of third cinema as defined by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.

Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution presents an in-depth study of films made between 1968 and 1982, the filmmakers and their practices, the political and cultural contexts in which the films were created and seen, and their afterlives among Palestinian refugees and young filmmakers in the twenty-first century. Nadia Yaqub discusses how early Palestinian cinema operated within emerging public-sector cinema industries in the Arab world, as well as through co-productions and solidarity networks. Yaqub also demonstrates that Palestinian film-making, as a cinema movement created and sustained under conditions of extraordinary precarity, offers important lessons on the nature and possibilities of political film-making more generally.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with Nadia Yaqub, hosted by filmmaker and academic, Azza El Hassan.