São Paulo – The documentary by the Brazilian filmmaker Omar de Barros Filho “The Brazilian Palestine” was selected for the 8th edition of the Latin Arab International Film Festival. The festival occurs from March 20 to 29, 2019 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the movie will be exhibited in the Latin Arab panorama section.
The news was received by the director in this first week of February. “We know there is a prize but for us who work in the documentary area, the prize is to make the movie, produce the movie. We faced several problems while makingit, specially when I went to film with the (production company) CenaUm in West Bank, Palestine,” told the director.
For Barros, the festival is very traditional and a bridge between the Latin-American and Arab culture and the public. “The Arab people is very strong in Latin America, in commerce and industry. The organization that holds the festival, Cinefértil, is very respected internationally for the quality of the cultural work it develops in Buenos Aires,” he said. For the director, who had some cameras confiscated when he took the plane back to Brazil, the greatest challenge was to live and feel the reality as a Palestinian.
The documentary was born after the director read a story in ANBA about the large number of people in the Palestinian community in Rio Grande do Sul. “I learned about the festival when I made the documentary addressing the situation of Palestinian immigrants that came to Rio Grande do Sul following the occupation of Palestine by Israel. “This community came to establish in Rio Grande, the capital, the metropolitan region, and the cities in the border with Uruguay and Argentina. And adapted to the Brazilian culture in this new political and social environment,” explained Barros.
“The movie deals with the universe that is present here and the one that stayed behind. The Palestinian community is suffering an apartheid by Israel, their cities are surrounded by walls. The country is divided. Israel sees itself as the owner of the surface and underground waters, the sky and the sea. It is a dramatic and sensitive situation,” said the filmmaker.
The documentary still hasn’t found a formal distribution, but its team has been distributing the work themselves. “I have been going to Palestinian communities in the country. It has been an opportunity to show this work to the communities. I’ve presented it in Porto Alegre and it is very interesting because the movie is very empathic with the Palestinian people, who gets emotional with it. I usually do a lecture afterwards, we talk about the movie and the situation in their country nowadays. For me, as an author, this totally makes up for the distribution. The community welcome it very openly, very honestly. I felt in debt in a way. I didn’t want to just make the movie and then disappear. I have been completing this circuit and I feel like this movie is important for them, because they see themselves depicted in a production they consider theirs. It stopped being mine, it’s theirs,” he declared.
Last year, the movie was exhibited during the 13rd Arab World Film Festival in São Paulo and the Festival de Cinema de Gramado. The feature film was projected in Tunisia during a special session of the movie that took place in Kasserine in the end of November of 2018, in the opening of the a cultural center celebrating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. For 2019, the filmmaker is organizing a new schedule and hopes to exhibit the work in other festivals.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
