This year, for the second year in a row, I am choosing TPFF over TIFF. There isn’t any particular reason why I began this tradition, except that last year, $50 got me into 10 TPFF screenings and it seemed like an incredible deal for festival action. I wasn’t sure what the quality of the festival would be like, but night after night of packed theatres, weeping eyes and an encouraging sense of solidarity, TPFF proved to be a tightly-run, grassroots event that was well worth my money and time. TPFF is an especially political choice this year, as filmmakers make noise about TIFF’s highlighting of Tel Aviv film in their new City to City program, accusing the festival of, “wittingly or unwittingly, [being] complicit in a million-dollar ‘Brand Israel’ PR campaign to change negative perceptions of the state of Israel.”
At the time of the inaugural festival last year, I was taking a Community Arts class, and one of our assignments was to interview a community art project leader. Film festivals in general aren’t considered to be community art projects, but there was something about TPFF that made it feel like one. This interview — with Robert Allison, one of the founders of TPFF — is a year old, but I think it captures the significance of the festival and I hope it drives you to check it out this year.
TPFF runs from September 26 to October 2. Films are scheduled at Bloor Cinema, Toronto Revue Cinema, Jackman Hall (AGO) and Empire Studio 10 (Mississauga). Tickets are $10, or $7 for seniors/students/unwaged. I recommend getting a package of 10 tickets for $75. You can use the package to order multiple tickets for single screenings; share one with a friend.
Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?1 – Arundhati Roy
A skeptic like myself will read the newspapers harbouring a vague suspicion toward anyone being heralded by the corporate media. It is this practice that led me, as a young teenager, to the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict; the story less told, the story revealing illegal occupation, displacement, loss, torture, humiliation and exile. It seemed so easy to stand on the side of social justice, to recognize the wrongs that had been committed, supported and sustained by Israel and its allies, to be aghast at the imposed immobilization, the spontaneous, arbitrary demolition of Palestinian homes, the swelling settlements that encroached the borders of the land formerly known as Palestine. How does a country cease to exist? Who could support this violent, 20th century incarnation of imperialism? When would this be undone—and could it be?
My relief in knowing fragments of the Palestinian story was squandered by the constant reminders indicating that siding with Arabs was unpopular, was equal to siding with radicals, siding with suicide bombers, siding with a people that was deemed unworthy of its own land.
But slivers of hope exist, they have existed between then and now, and they have never been more optimistically manifested than in the inaugural Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF), which took place between October 25th and November 1st (2008) across four venues in both Toronto and Mississauga. It might not be a vast hope, or a promising one, but it is one that exists at last, and one that exists to be shared.
Film festivals aren’t traditionally considered community art projects, but with a mandate combining awareness, education and engagement, TPFF establishes itself as a collaborative group with open arms, reaching out and letting in, building momentum with prior individual film screenings that led to the conception of a fuller, more organized festival. Robert Allison, one of the core volunteers who founded the festival, spoke to me about TPFF, which he says, “belonged to everyone who chose to be a part of it.”
It was July 2006. Israel was dropping bombs on Lebanon. Over a thousand people were dead, Lebanese civil infrastructure was severely damaged, and nearly two million citizens—both Lebanese and Israeli—were displaced. Watching from Toronto, Robert Allison was angry. He ended up at a demonstration in an attempt to channel his outrage toward the unprovoked and undeserved brutality, but he wasn’t sure if it was the right outlet. Allison knew he wanted to make a contribution but kept asking himself, “Where am I comfortable?” And then, a tremendous opportunity presented itself. Allison visited Egypt and Lebanon, and after “standing in the ruins of where bombs had been dropped,” he found a new purpose for activism back home. When he returned to Toronto, it was already a year since the first bombs dropped. He wanted to show a film to commemorate the anniversary.
Allison’s history of showing marginalized films begins here, and his efforts have culminated into a full-fledged festival that focuses specifically on film works about and by Palestinians. It was during this process and configuration of individual screenings that Allison was convinced of the desperate hunger for knowledge and truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amongst Torontonians—every time he showed a film at the Brunswick (which has since closed), he was screening to sold-out crowds that included innumerable unfamiliar faces—people he didn’t recognize from the activist community. By the time the second anniversary of the July War came around, Allison says that he and the people he was organizing with “were forming as a collective,” and it was around this time that he was coming into contact with film works that focused specifically on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Allison’s interest in this particular conflict had little to do with Israel or Palestine specifically. “One of the things that affected me about the whole issue was social justice. Right and wrong. I don’t care who’s doing the killing; I just know that killing is wrong. So I stand on the side of those being killed,” he says. By reframing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of social justice, Allison was able to reach into other activist communities who would share in the process of proliferating awareness and education. By focusing on justice—instead of ethnicity—TPFF was able to “reach out to different communities” based on the mix of the collective, says Allison. They were also able to educate and breed empathy amongst people who had existing prejudices against Palestinians—including Allison’s father and grandmother. By expanding the terms of inclusion, by extending a hand to non-Palestinians, engagement beyond those already in the know was possible.
With the planning of a coherent festival underway, I ask Allison where TPFF found financial support. Although he wasn’t in charge of that aspect of the festival, he admits to taking a cue from his parents, who ran a theatre for ten years without receiving a dime of government funding. “The key is that they got to do what they want,” Allison says, while admitting that TPFF did receive nominal support from public funding bodies (the receipt of which was protested by Conservative bloggers in the city). “My personal feeling was that we should apply for the grants, but not rely on them,” he says. Instead, TPFF found the support of local businesses to fund the festival but more importantly, they partnered with local festivals and organizations to co-present films, creating an expansive network that colludes with other initiatives that are either ethnic-specific or arts-based. With an attitude that claims “we don’t need to do somersaults to get these people to support us,” Allison found that “people came out of the woodwork,” including Frederick, a French journalist-turned-restaurateur from Le Select Bistro who not only gave organizers free meals and donated cash to the festival, but distributed TPFF programs to his customers before and during the festival.
Programming the festival introduced new challenges that ensured little else but the promise of spontaneous improvisation. Allison’s only specification for screenings—which took place every Sunday in his home after a meeting with volunteer committee members—was that at least one Palestinian be present. Over 200 films were submitted to the festival, and though a rating system was devised, selections were made on a case-by-case basis. Allison shares a devastating story about Palestinian filmmaker Hanna Elias to exemplify this selection process. Elias, who teaches filmmaking to kids in Bethlehem, was traveling from Los Angeles to Bethlehem with a stopover in Switzerland, where he boarded an Israeli airline. Airline staff obliterated his film equipment and poured salt into an already deep wound by searching his personal belongings. Despite his films having exorbitant screening fees that the festival had already passed on, “you hear this story from him and you want to support this guy,” Allison says. “He’s going through hell.” Elias’s The Olive Harvest and The Mountain were both screened during TPFF to packed audiences.
The only guarantee in selecting films is that “it’s a balancing act,” says Allison. All told, the selection process allowed for another layer of community to emerge amongst committee members and filmmakers. Mohammed Alatar, director of The Iron Wall and Jerusalem: East Side Story said, “I don’t care about money, just show my film.” Other artists, like Palestinian filmmaker and producer Annemarie Jacir (the sister of visual artist Emily Jacir, whose installation came to A Space last year), were phenomenally accommodating in making professional connections for Allison to acquire films that seemed shrouded in red tape. And still other factors were working in TPFF’s favour.
Allison is conscientious of the apprehension sponsored events have to program this kind of content. “There’s a reason why 23 of the films were Canadian premieres,” Allison says, explaining that TPFF’s opening and closing films—Salt of This Sea and Slingshot Hip-Hop—were both turned down by the Toronto International Film Festival, even though they had been around the international film festival circuit and were Official Selections at Cannes and Sundance, respectively. He also notes that Hot Docs gave a total of six minutes to Palestinian content. The wedge created by reticence was enthusiastically filled by TPFF. “We created the space,” says Allison, and it was one where an existing community was fortified by the awareness and education of new audiences.
TPFF sold thousands of tickets in the eight days of the festival. That’s thousands of opportunities for awareness, education, empathy and hope. But Allison admits there were shortcomings, things that would certainly be applied in subsequent presentations of the festival: context, conversation, and educational materials. Allison’s first regret is that “we did not appropriately build in a mechanism for these people to talk about what they had just seen.” He also thinks that there should have been “information for people to walk away with.” Although many of the films explicitly used the political crisis as a backdrop to their stories, “we need to spend $2000 on educational materials,” says Allison. He also plans to continue individual screenings throughout the year, so that education doesn’t stop on November 2nd.
In crisis, solidarity breeds empathy, empathy breeds hope and hope breeds change. TPFF proves that solidarity can extend beyond the borders of ethnicity and touch the hearts and minds of Torontonians who know social injustice when they see it—and feel enough to contribute to its amelioration.
1 Roy, Arundhati. “Come September.” Lannan Foundation Reading & Conversations. Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe. 18 Sept. 2002. 9 Aug. 2009. 11 Nov. 2008 <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=945405493000735497>.
