Palestine
David Kettle
With its five-hour Angels in America, the International Festival has already hosted one production of epic proportions in Edinburgh this year. At getting on for three and a half hours, Al-Sirah Al-Hilaliyyah almost counts as its second – and there’s no doubting, in any case, its epic subject matter. This is a huge, sprawling Arabic poem from around the 11th century, telling of the political manoeuvrings, the conflicts and the magnificent victories of the Bani Hilal people and their great warrior hero Abu Zeid. It’s been transformed into a stage production by Palestinian company Khashabi Read more ...
David Kettle
QFWFQ, Summerhall ★★★★At first glance, an iconic post-modern novel (or, perhaps more accurately, "novel") by Italo Calvino might not seem like the most obvious starting point for a searing condemnation of Zionism and Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But Los Angeles-based performance artist and writer Gregory Nussen finds a convincing if perhaps unlikely path between the two in the slippery, witty solo show QFWFQ (named after the protagonist in another of Calvino’s works, The Cosmicomics).And if you don’t know Calvino’s 1979 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, then it probably suffices to say that Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the delirious and exhilarating Sephardic dance that finished their concert devoted to the Jewish, Muslim and Christian music of Jerusalem, one of the Apollo’s Fire fiddlers seemed to be playing – so my companion spotted – some Led Zeppelin riffs. In which case, the Chicago- and Cleveland-based Baroque orchestra had achieved a sort of cross-genre full house, or music classifier’s utter nightmare. File under: ClassicalFolkWorldJazz... Rock. The night before, however, the Bach Double Violin Concerto had skipped and flown through St Martin-in-the-Fields with bravura elegance as much Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Wars in the Middle East provoke furious arguments. Red hot. So why is British theatre so cool, distinctly chilly, about staging new work about these controversial issues? If any proof is needed that current new writing is meek and mild then it must surely be this. Even the exceptions are not exceptional: written by Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak, Between the River and the Sea, first seen at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin last year and now comes to the Royal Court via Edinburgh, is a likeable autobiographical one-man show about Middle-Eastern identity which insistently avoids the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab caused an international outcry at last year's Venice film festival – a fact that the Oscar-nominated Tunisian director prefers to play down. "I'm a director. I don't usually like to talk about my films," she said. But this time was different. There was an unusually heavy burden of responsibility.Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, the film was inspired by tragic real events. On 29 January 2024, Palestinian Red Crescent staff received an emergency call from Gaza. A five-year-old girl called Hind Rajab was trapped in her aunt and uncle's car, Read more ...
James Saynor
We might simply call it a dilemma, but Hollywood screenwriters call it a “crisis decision”, or maybe sometimes a “swivel”. It’s when there’s an impossible choice, in movies sublime or ridiculous, whether it’s Rick choosing between Ilsa and beating the Nazis in Casablanca, or – in the latter category – pointless superheroes choosing between a baby and the entire globe in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.Yet the crisis decision to end them all occurs a long way from Hollywood in The Voice of Hind Rajab, a brisk, unbearably fraught dramatisation of an emblematic event in the Gaza war – when a six Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alabaster DePlume, aka Mancunian Gus Fairbairn, has been an antically charming performer, confounding unsuspecting crowds with tenderly comic philosophy, voice Tiny Tim-eccentric yet alive to mental fragility, and attuning listeners to the brave possibilities in their every breath. Operating at a quizzical angle to London’s jazz scene, he surfs his own, sui generis wavelength.Working with West Bank Palestinian musicians during the Gaza War had clearly changed DePlume in gigs in Brighton and Norway’s Moldejazz festival, and A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole. He sometimes found elevated Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically supplanted by Israel’s seismic 1948 founding.
The Gaza War meant director Annemarie Jacir filmed under duress, with her original West Bank village set overrun by Jewish settlers and Jordan standing in, before a defiant return to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The war impacted Jacir in subtler ways, emotionally entailing a straightforward film shorn of levity or experiment. The result is a low-budget equivalent to David Lean, less interested in Lawrence of Read more ...
David Kettle
The Horse of Jenin, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★ Alaa Shehada bounds onto the stage, all muscular energy and swaggering self-confidence, for what’s effectively a cross between stand-up and solo theatre. Is it wrong to joke about Palestine? Definitely not, the larger-than-life, matey Shehada clearly thinks, finding plenty that’s funny, or certainly much that’s bleakly ironic, in his native city of Jenin in the West Bank, its cast of flawed, colourful characters, and its strange and awkward ways of life. With the threatening spectre of Israeli occupation constantly in the background.In many ways, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Amid these troubling times, can we not all live in the world of the 2025 Oscars' runaway success story, an ever-smiling Sean Baker? That thought increasingly crossed my mind as the 97th Academy Awards crawled towards its close, a promise early on from host Conan O'Brien not to "waste time" abandoned more or less as soon as it had been spoken.But even as one wondered about a peculiarly timed James Bond tribute – in far from cheering news, the rights to 007 were recently purchased by Amazon – or any number of lame comedy sequences (a poorly dressed Adam Sandler fleeing the auditorium Read more ...
Mark Kidel
As the Middle East continues to fragment in hate and horror, a tragic unfolding of events with roots reaching back to the middle of the last century, any sign of love and deeply felt collaboration provides a welcome beacon, and signals the possibility of understanding and reconciliation.Ana Silvera (pictured below), a British Sephardi Jew with family from Izmir and Aleppo, sings songs from the Ladino tradition, the culture that accompanied the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th Century. Saied Silbak (pictured below, right), a Palestinian oud player, draws on Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.In one scene, for instance, West Bank teenager Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), burning with anger and grief – his house has been bulldozed and his brother shot dead by a Jewish settler – sits down in front of the evening news: “Bombs continued to pound Gaza today,” announces the unseen newsreader Read more ...