PLEASE NOTE: Community Language and Culture Bank officially changed its name to Center for Intercultural Organizing in August, 2005 to better reflect our mission, work and values.

PRESS RELEASE

Community Language and Culture Bank
Media Contact: Stephanie D. Stephens
stephanie@interculturalorganizing.org
http://www.interculturalorganizing.org
More Information: (503) 287-4117

2004 PALESTINIAN FILM FESTIVAL
"Art Under Occupation"

SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2004
5:00 to 10:00 PM

Introduction 5:00 to 5:40 PM

FILM #1
Gaza Strip ( 72 minutes)
5:40 PM - 6:52 PM

American documentary filmmaker James Longley traveled to the Gaza Strip in January of 2001, planning to stay for two weeks and collect preliminary material for a film about the Palestinian intifada. He threw away his return ticket and stayed for another 3 months, shooting over 75 hours of material throughout the Gaza Strip. Gaza Strip follows a range of people and events following the election of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, including the first major armed incursion into "Area A" by IDF forces during this intifada. The film is filmed almost entirely in a verite style, presented without narration and with little explanation, focusing on ordinary Palestinians rather than politicians and pundits. More observation than political argument, Gaza Strip offers a rare look inside the stark realities of Palestinian life and death under Israeli military occupation

FILM #2
On the Ground: Witness, Resist, Rebuild (20 minutes)
6:54 PM- 7:14 PM

On the Ground: Witness, Resist, Rebuild, filmed in August 2003, follows Israeli activist Jeff Halper to Jerusalem house demolitions, culminating in his arrest for civil disobedience in a multinational effort to save the Jabari family's home. That same week, volunteers helped the Shawamreh family build the Beit Arabiya Peace Center on their land, where their home was demolished four times before.

DISCUSSION (31 min ) 7: 14 PM- 7:45 PM

BREAK ( 20 min. ) 7:45 PM - 8:05 PM

FILM #3
Palestine Is Still The Issue (53 minutes)
8:15 PM- 9:08 PM

In 1977, the award-winning journalist and film-maker, John Pilger, made a documentary called Palestine Is Still The Issue (1977). He told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. In this in-depth documentary, he has returned to the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo -- refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.

In a series of extraordinary interviews with both Palestinians and Israelis, John Pilger weaves together the issue of Palestine. He speaks to the families of suicide bombers and their victims; he sees the humiliation of Palestinians imposed on them at myriad checkpoints and with a permit system not dissimilar to apartheid South Africa's infamous pass laws. He goes into the refugee camps and meets children who, he says, "no longer dream like other children, or if they do, it is about death."

Continually asking for the solution, John Pilger says it is time to bring justice, as well as peace, to Palestine.

FILM #4
Shorts (10 minutes)
9:10 PM- 9:20 PM

DISCUSSION ( 40 min ) 9:20 PM - 10:00 PM

Where: Portland State University Multicultural Center
Smith Memorial Center, 2nd Floor (SW Broadway & Montgomery)
When: Saturday, May 22, 2004 - 5:00 to 10:00 PM
Free and Open to the Public