Michel Khleifi
Born in Nazareth in 1950 to a Palestinian working-class family, Michel Khleifi is considered the founder of contemporary Palestinian cinema and one of its most original voices. After immigrating to Belgium in 1970, he studied theatre and television at INSAS, Brussels and worked for RTBF (Belgian television) before making his first feature‐length documentary, Fertile Memories (1980), which combined a lyrical aesthetic with a critical political engagement, as did Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction (1985).
In 1987, he directed Wedding in Galilee, the first feature film entirely shot in Palestine by a Palestinian director, which premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and won the International Critics Prize among many other awards. The film marked Palestinian cinema’s entry into the international scene. A further three features followed: Canticle of the Stones (1990), L’ordre du jour (1992) and Tale of the Three Jewels (1995), and documentaries Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land (1996) and Route 181 – Fragments of a Journey in Palestine and Israel (2002, co‐directed with Eyal Sivan). Zindeeq (2009) won the Golden Muhr at the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival. Khleifi lives in Brussels, where he has taught filmmaking at INSAS for over thirty years, in addition to other teaching posts at Columbia University, St Joseph University in Beirut and AM Qattan Foundation in Palestine and Jordan.
Artist Events
Toward a Sumudic Cinema
Michel Khleifi Ayreen Anastas Rene Gabri
Michel will screen his landmark documentary of anti-colonial time and persistence, Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction, clips from some other films, and discuss them with Rene and Ayreen as examples of Sumudic Cinema.
A Conference of Butterflies
Anti-Denialist Museum of Palestine Nasser Abourahme Carmel Alabassi Ayreen Anastas Mahmoud Alshaer Rene Gabri Avery F. Gordon Michel Khleifi David Lloyd Peter Makhlouf Nicholas Mirzoeff Majdal Nateel Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Lara Sheehi Françoise Vergès Additional Contributors
This edition of the Conference of Butterflies asks contributors to share words, notions, practices which nourish or obstruct our movements from perceiving and abolishing all the forces, forms, institutions maintaining the planetary regime of ongoing Nakba.