Name: Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem
Year: 2010
Duration: Appx. 30 mins. per episode

If you haven’t heard of this show, please do yourself a favor and watch at least one episode. Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem is a reality-style show shot exclusively in Occupied Palestine and broadcast exclusively on the show’s YouTube Channel. They began shooting on March 1st, 2010 and plan to do 90 shows in 90 days (currently, they are on episode 73). Every episode is shot, edited, translated (when necessary), and uploaded onto YouTube on the same day!

From their channel:

Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem is a video diary about young Palestinian women, Muslim and Christian, living in Gaza, Jerusalem and the rest of The West Bank. We will make 90 films in 90 days, non-stop, no scripts and no intervention! The idea here is to show you the real life of Palestinians through the daily activities of the Sleepless Girls!…..The intention of this series is neither rant nor rhetoric. It is rather an opportunity for those who do not live in Palestine to grasp how real people live out their daily lives, precisely because their lives are stories that journalists are too often told by their editors to think of almost dismissively as human interest and almost necessarily conflict driven.

You can watch the series at the following link:

Sleepless in Gaza….and Jerusalem

For this week’s REEL Thursdays feature, we bring you Paradise Now, a film about two Palestinian men preparing for a suicide attack in Israel.

From the director:

“The film is an artistic point of view of that political issue,” Abu-Assad said. “The politicians want to see it as black and white, good and evil, and art wants to see it as a human thing.”

Title: Paradise Now
Year: 2005
Duration: 75 mins.

The story places two close friends, Palestinians Said and Khaled, recruited by an extremist group to perpetrate a terrorist attack in Tel-Aviv, blowing up themselves. However, things go wrong and both friends must separate in the border. One of them, maintaining in his purpose of carry the attack to the end, and the other will have his doubts about it.

The film is in English and Arabic with subtitles and can be viewed on Google Video below:

[google 6623830248703380795 Paradise Now]

For this week’s REEL Thursdays feature, we bring you Promises, a documentary film that examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspectives of seven children living in the Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Israeli neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

Name: Promises
Year: 2001
Duration: 106 mins.

The film follows Israeli-American filmmaker B.Z. Goldberg as he meets with seven Palestinian and Israeli children between the ages of nine and thirteen, seeing the Middle East conflict through their eyes. Rather than focus on specific political events, the film gives voice to these children, who, although living only 20 minutes apart, live in completely separate worlds. The most important aspect of the film is that it allows “ordinary” kids to develop natural bonds of affection by simply playing games with each other – bonds which transcend the clutter of prejudices they have heard from their parents.

The film is in English, Arabic, and Hebrew with subtitles and can be viewed on YouTube at the following link:

Promises

REEL Thursdays aims to share a weekly dose of movies, documentaries, and independent films which deal with a variety of important issues including, but not limited to, human rights, political activism, social justice, non-violent peace movements, and stories of struggle, resistance, and triumph in an otherwise oppressive world.

And now for our first REEL Thursdays feature…

Title: In the Spider’s Web
Year: 2004
Duration: 47 mins.

In the Spider’s Web is a documentary produced by Al-Haq and is part of Al-Haq’s campaign to stop collective punishment practiced by Israeli occupying forces against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In the Spider’s Web provides an overview of these punitive measures against the Palestinian civilians. While the film mainly addresses the accounts of two women, it also highlights the impact that collective punishment has on the whole civilian population. The film also takes the audience to a girls’ school in Hebron, where it shows a typical day in the lives of these students. The documentary also seeks to capture and relay some of the disastrous implications of the continuing construction of the Annexation Wall and the further expropriation of land for its construction.

The film is in Arabic with English subtitles and can be viewed on YouTube at the following link. (Just click on Part 1 and it will automatically play the consecutive parts in the playlist.)

In the Spider’s Web