The first-ever Boston Palestine Film Festival opened with a bang this Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) with a documentary about Leila Khaled, who in 1969 was the first woman to hijack an airplane. Five venues, including the Harvard Film Archive and the Kendall Square Cinema, are featuring over 40 films and shorts, many of which have never been shown in the U.S. Dealing with a variety of topics ranging from the so-called “Iron Wall” to driving a cab in Los Angeles, the festival runs for nine days has surprised even its organizers with its popularity.

According to Nitin Sawhney, a member of the festival’s organizing committee, one of the greatest difficulties faced was convincing the MFA to “take this risk” and co-present the films. But the risk seemed to have been worthwhile for all parties involved, as viewers filled the theater on Saturday.

“People are craving for a wider exposure to Palestinian art and these [films] are easy to watch,” says Sawhney.

The festival is geared toward the broader exposure to Palestinian art and identity through film screenings—according to the organizers, the material is carefully picked in order to fit a mainstream audience. However, nearly anything to do with Palestine has the potential to quickly become controversial.

CHOMSKY WEIGHS IN

Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT and a longtime commentator on the Middle East, writes in an e-mail, “Among dedicated anti-Semites, or passionate supporters of the destruction of Israel, an Israeli film festival would no doubt be interpreted as ‘being political.’ By the same token, among anti-Palestinian racists, or passionate supporters of Israel’s right to crush Palestinians, a ‘festival centered around Palestine’ will no doubt be interpreted as ‘being political.’”

“Of course there is a crucial asymmetry,” Chomsky writes. “Palestine is being destroyed before our eyes by U.S.-backed Israeli actions. So for those reasons, ‘talking about Palestine’ has a definite political cast in the U.S. and Israel.”

The majority of the organizing committee members are human rights activists, but Sawhney firmly declares that they are not indulging in “mere political propaganda.” The subject of most of these films cannot be taken lightly: heavy sighs came from the audience at the Harvard Film Archive as children from refugee camps spoke of their homeland over nostalgic music.

‘OCCUPATION 101’

In a festival like this, politics cannot be easily left at the door—this fact is particularly true for the branch of the festival that takes place at Harvard. Student groups involved in the organization of the festival such as the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee and Justice for Palestine were asked to choose the themes they preferred to be covered here on campus.

More academic and activist films and shorts were shown for free in Langdell South in the Harvard Law School. “Occupation 101,” a critically-lauded documentary on the roots of the Isreali-Palestinian conflict, is the highlight of these showings.

According to Chomsky, the choice of that film reflects the interests of students.

“There is a special interest for American students in this case, because whether they know it or not, their jackboot is on the necks of Palestinians, and has been for a long time,” he writes.

FUTURE UNCERTAIN

The rest of the festival grapples with the difficulty of portraying Palestinian life in a somewhat more “entertaining and educational” way, as Sawhney puts it. A struggling Palestinian actor in Los Angeles is cast as an Al-Qaeda terrorist in a play in “Driving to Zigzigland,” being shown on Oct. 6, 5pm at Kendall Square Theatre. A hungry, edgy Arab football team wins the Israeli national cup in “Hardball.”

The Boston Palestine Film Festival will become a yearly phenomenon, according to its organizers—no matter how controversial its films may be.

As Roy Cohen ’10, an Israeli citizen, says, “I am very happy that some of the films are shown in Coolidge Corner Movie Theatre, as it is located in the center of one of the biggest Jewish communities in the Boston area. This is, to me, a symbol of hope…I hope that [the festival] will continue to return in future years and that its incorporation in local culture will become inevitable.”

—Staff writer Anna I. Polonyi can be reached at apolonyi@fas.harvard.edu.