Brussels-Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi celebrated with Joseph Plateau Honorary Award

As early as the 1980s Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi offered an alternative, cinematic route through the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. With films like Fertile Memory and Noce en Galilée he offers insights not only into the historical roots of the conflict, but also into the recent escalations in the region. Tonight the Brussels based director was present at Film Fest Gent for a unique retrospective of his work and a one-on-one Director’s Talk. In between, he was awarded a Joseph Plateau Honorary Award, in recognition of his exceptional work.

Groundbreaking

Born in Nazareth to a Palestinian family, Michel Khleifi moved to Belgium in the 1970s, where he started studying film and theatre direction at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle (INSAS). After a few television reports in the 1980s, Khleifi travelled to his homeland to shoot his first feature film, Fertile Memory (1981), a hybrid film that demonstrates how the Israeli occupation shapes the personal lives and opinions of two very different Palestinian women. It was the first ever feature film shot at the Palestinian West Bank and the start of a career of eight politically engaged films about the injustices taking place on occupied Palestinian land.

After making the short Ma'loul fête sa destruction (1985), about a group of former Palestinian inhabitants who are allowed to return to their hometown once a year, he made his fiction debut Noce en Galilée (1987). This portrait of the good but questionable intentions of an Arab patriarch not only signified Khleifi’s international breakthrough, it was also the first ever Palestinian film to be screened at the Cannes film festival, where it received the International Critics Prize.

In the 1990s and 2000s, he continued making politically committed films, includingForbidden Marriages in the Holy Land (1999), a documentary about mixed Arabic-Jewish couples and their day to day difficulties. For Zindeeq (2009), his latest film to date, he received the award for Best Arab Feature Film at the Dubai International Film Festival.

Joseph Plateau Honorary Award

Khleifi was awarded the Joseph Plateau Honorary Award after a Director’s Talk during which he discussed the milestones of his career. Following and preceding the talk, Film Fest Gent showcased Fertile Memory, Ma'loul fête sa destruction and Noce en Galilée – recently restored by CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium – as well as Gillo Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (1985), Khleifi’s film of choice.

Earlier this week actress Emily Watson (Small Things Like These) was presented the Joseph Plateau Honorary Award and, during previous editions, influential filmmakers like Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Terence Davies and Céline Sciamma, among others, shared in this honour. The award itself is a replica of professor Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope, the device he designed to illustrate his theory of the persistence of vision, which became the basic principle behind the idea of 'moving images'.