Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza
A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali (1940 – 2009), one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Footage shot by a French news team and edited by Abu Ali in Lebanon, is one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza.
Abu Ali’s experimental editing techniques produced a cinematically and politically subversive film, which won best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and screened at multiple festivals. This is the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.
- Country: Libanon, Palestina / Lebanon, State of Palestine
- Year: 1973
- Length: 13
- Director: Mustafa Abu Ali (مصطفى أبو علي)
Mustafa Abu Ali (مصطفى أبو علي)
Mustafa Abu Ali was a Palestinian filmmaker, considered one of the founders of Palestinian cinema, and the Palestinian Cinema Association in Beirut in 1973, (re-established in Ramallah in 2004). studied at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1960s before studying cinema in London, graduating in 1967. Along with Sulafa Jadallah and Hani Jowharieh, he established the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) – which saw its primary task as «documenting the revolution and creating an archive of images of historical documents".
After the PLO’s move to Lebanon after the events of Black September, the PFU was renamed the Palestine Cinema Institute and became one of the seven departments of the PLO’s Unified Media, headed by Abu Ali from 1973 to 1975. Abu Ali wrote four screenplays and directed more than 30 films, for which he won more than 14 awards, the most recent from the 2003 Ismailia Film Festival.