Palestine Blues
The UCLA Film & Television Archive and Los Angeles Filmforum present
Palestine Blues
Saturday April 26, 2025, 7:30pm
At the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum
More info at: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/palestine-blues-2025-04-26
Free
In-person: Q&A with Nida Sinnokrot, director of "Palestine Blues" and Associate Professor in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT, moderated by Saree Makdisi, Chair of the UCLA Department of English.
Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
Special thanks to our community partners: Consortium for Palestine Studies at UCLA, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles Filmforum.
A Phantom Hill (El Chinero: Un cerro fantasma)
By Bani Khoshnoudi
Mexico, 2022, DCP, b&w, 11 min. Director: Bani Khoshnoudi.
Bani Khoshnoudi’s haunting experimental short El Chinero bears witness to Chinese and Asian migrants believed to have perished on a hill of the same name in California’s Baja region in 1916. Silent text gives way to a thunderous score and textured 16mm desert images that reconstruct memory from absence. Shot with a Bolex camera and assembled by hand, the film meditates on historical erasure and the land’s power to testify when the archive cannot.
Palestine Blues
Director: Nida Sinnokrot
U.S./Palestine, 2006, DCP, color, 72 min.
This urgent, poetic documentary captures the resistance of Palestinian farmers in the village of Jayyous as Israel’s separation wall threatens their survival. Shot in a guerilla-style of cinéma vérité that heightens dramatic tension, the film largely forgoes narration, opting instead to let the voices and struggles of Jayyous’ citizens, some of whom are director Nida Sinnokrot’s relatives, speak for themselves. Palestine Blues is an intimate, deeply human portrait of resilience in the face of displacement and occupation.— Public Programmer Beandrea July