Michel Khleifi

  • Michel Khleifi – Hikayatul jawahiri thalath AKA The Tale of the Three Lost Jewels (1995)

    Michel Khleifi1991-2000ArthouseDramaPalestine
    Hikayatul jawahiri thalath (1995)
    Hikayatul jawahiri thalath (1995)

    A Palestinian boy becomes entranced with a beautiful Gypsy girl and a fairy tale world she weaves amidst conflict in Gaza. The children explore nature, mysticism and what their future holds, while learning to live with the surrounding brutality c. 1990. Yusef’s family scrapes by in a seaside camp while his father’s in prison and his heavily-armed brother’s on the run, parrying with Israeli troops. Salah, Yusef’s schoolmate from a well-off Arab family strives faithfully to assist them, while Yusef helps an elderly, blind neighbor escape from his lonely abandonment into the North American dreamworld he’s waited so long for.Read More »

  • Michel Khleifi – Urs al-jalil AKA Wedding in Galilee (1987)

    1981-1990DramaMichel KhleifiPalestine
    Urs al jalil (1987)
    Urs al jalil (1987)

    A Palestinian seeks Israeli permission to waive curfew to give his son a fine wedding. The military governor’s condition is that he and his officers attend. The groom berates his father for agreeing. Women ritually prepare the bride; men prepare the groom. Guests gather. The Arab youths plot violence. One Israeli officer swoons in the heat and Arab women take her into the cool house. A thoroughbred gets loose and runs to a mined field; soldiers and Arabs must cooperate to rescue it. As darkness falls, tensions between army and villagers rise, and the groom’s wedding-night anger and impotence threaten family dignity and honor. Can cool heads prevail?Read More »

  • Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan – Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (2003)

    Documentary2001-2010BelgiumEyal SivanMichel KhleifiPolitics

    Plot
    Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel takes a fresh look at the inhabitants of Palestine-Israel. For two months in the summer of 2002, two film-makers, the Israeli Eyal Sivan and the Palestinian Michel Khleifi, travelled together through Palestine-Israel from north to south, tracing a map of routes they called Route 181, following the imaginary frontier of Resolution 181 adopted by the United Nations on 29 November 1947, which provided for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. Fifty-five years later Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi give men and women, Israelis and Palestinians, young and old, civilians and military, anonymous people living their everyday lives, a chance to talk about those lives, their experiences, their situation, their particular memory and their personal understanding of what is going on around them. All of them, found by chance in the course of Sivan and Khleifi’s journey, have their own way of looking at the frontiers that separate them from their neighbours: concrete, barbed wire, cynicism, indifference, mistrust, aggression.
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