It’s quite a weekend for New York’s prodigal child. Hip-Hop, that burst of youthful energy that was put out into the universe 30 plus years ago is coming back home from several places at once. It’s arriving at a time when Rap music, in its birthplace, confusingly straddles the realms of hyper-capitalism, political activism, youth expression, marginalized’s […]
My Land, a new documentary on the occupied territories of Palestine by Nabil Ayouch, opens with the statement by the director that his background gave rise to the inquiry his film makes. In the Israel-Palestine conflict this is almost a statement of the obvious: where you come from defines your position. Ayouch is one of […]
Short films sometimes get a bad rap — they’re considered a “learning exercise” for film school students, or worse, they’re made synonymous with boring, pretentious art house… stuff. This year’s matinee trio at NYAFF had some fun with these stereotypes. Osvalde Lewat’s ‘Sderot, Last Exit’ is an experimental documentary that follows student filmmakers as they […]
In an astoundingly ambitious new series of 12 feature-length documentaries titled The Price of Kings (available to watch online) the British production company Spirit Level Films challenge the perception of leadership in provocative and imaginative ways. Through a creative counterpoint between historical ‘truth’ and memory, and supported by powerful archival material, the series thoughtfully and […]
Next week Omar Barghouti, one of the organizers of a cultural and academic boycott against Israel, will join legendary U.S.-based scholar-activists Angela Davis and Fred Moten to discuss the correlations between the divestment campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime and the disinvestment movement against Israel in Southern Calfornia
The Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, has put out a short PDF of critical responses to the late Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis. This is the quick view of the PDF from a close collaborator who studies Said’s work closely and knows the Institute:
If you know me, you know one of my favorite quotes: “I’ve never felt myself to belong to any establishment of any kind, any mainstream. I’m interested in mainstreams, I’m jealous of them, I sometimes, occasionally, envy people who belong to them — because certainly I don’t — but on the whole I think they’re […]
