Palestine
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 ...
Nick Hasted
The Israel-Palestine conflict aptly infuses a haunted house in Muayad Alayan’s story of layered loss. The Shapiro family home in Jerusalem which grieving British-Jewish husband Michael (Johnny Harris) and daughter Rebecca (Rebecca Calder) retreat to as a sanctuary already bears the pain of past Palestinian owners, as ghost stories multiply.This is a girl’s adventure story from 10-year-old Rebecca’s perspective, as she longs for her mum, dead in a car crash in which Rebecca was a passenger, hurt repressed by her dad. “I keep trying to hide everything that might trigger her past,” he tells a Read more ...
David Kettle
Distant Memories of the Near Future, Summerhall ★★★★About three decades into the future, love has been "solved" – with (what else?) an algorithm, and a healthy splash of AI. It’s so successful, in fact, that states worldwide officially mandate computer-generated coupledom because of its benefits for productivity and consumption. Heaven help you if you’re one of the rare undesirables, unmatchable with another by the ubiquitous Q-PID app. Meanwhile, all the flowers have disappeared, asteroids are being mined for their rare minerals (now exhausted on Earth), and a compulsary daily 10- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In another flare-up of Pyrrhic Hamas missiles and punitive Israeli bombing one year ago, over 60 Gazan children were killed. Michael Winterbottom and his Palestinian co-director Mohammad Sawwaf made Eleven Days in May as a “simple memorial to the children who lost their lives”. Sawwaf interviewed surviving relatives, who detailed those lives and erased futures. The result is an understated, unanswerable anti-war film.Sawwaf frames surviving relatives in simple group portraits, structuring the film like a photo album. They sketch affecting, affectless biographies. “Mirwal was two years old, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
The beginning of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is officially dated to 7 June 1967, the occasion of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during the Six-Day War, but its origins stretch back further.The Palestine War, recognised by Israel as the War of Independence, and by Palestinians as the Nakba (literally, "catastrophe"), took place between 1947 and 1949, and it was nearly three decades earlier that the Mandate for Palestine was assigned, in 1918. For the date of the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, you need go as far back as 1897.Whatever Read more ...
David Lan
In June 2001 the London Festival of International Theatre brought Amir Nizar Zuabi’s Alive from Palestine to the Royal Court Theatre for one performance. The Guardian said, “How often do you see a piece of necessary theatre? These 'stories under occupation' fall precisely into that category. We are used to the idea of theatre as a diversion. Here it is fulfilling a more important function of bringing us the news.”I didn’t see it and I couldn’t get hold of a full script – perhaps there wasn’t one – but by reading a print-out of the English surtitles I felt I’d got enough of a sense of its Read more ...
graham.rickson
Raed Andoni’s semi-documentary Ghost Hunting (Istiyad Ashbah) is nominally "about" the Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners but is an effective, potent denunciation of human rights abuses across the modern world. Andoni’s booklet introduction includes the sobering statistic that more than four in 10 Palestinian men are, at least once in their lives, arrested or investigated in Israeli prisons, some as young as 12. Andoni himself was held and tortured as a teenager at al-Moscobiya detention centre, and this 2017 semi-documentary is partially an attempt to exorcise his demons. As he puts Read more ...
theartsdesk
At the end of an exhausting day's driving punctuated by disappointments and false leads, the narrator finds herself back at the Israeli town of Nirim where she spends the night. Slipping off early in the morning, she first fills her eyes with the view of Gaza on behalf of her colleagues who grew up there and now live in the West Bank. Driving south, she stops at a cluster of houses that might be a forgotten village.–––––I keep driving, past barren hills that slowly turn into pale yellow sand again, while the traffic diminishes until there are no other cars. Now, the only movement belongs to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Has anyone else noticed how fulltime this streaming thing has become? Those who were of a mind to (and who never slept) could find enough cultural output to satisfy 24/7, especially if one adds to the free offerings that crop up by the week the ongoing back catalogue made available on sites such as Marquee TV or Digital Theatre, and the like. While those platforms continue to roam freely across productions and even art forms, each week brings with it a fresh supply of intriguing fare. This week's lineup includes curiosities from the very different minds of Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Read more ...