The checkpoint is closed. “Detour, detour!” shouts a taxi driver and announces the beginning of the journey. The film follows the adventurous attempts by individuals and groups as they search for gaps in the Wall, devise myriad strategies to sneak past it. The Wall has made Palestinians prisoners in their own country. Some do make it through, while others get arrested by the Israeli army: a never-ending cat-and-mouse game, retraced in the film.

Khaled Jarrar was born in Jenin and graduated with a degree in Interior Design from the Palestine Polytechnic University in 1996, and in 2011 from the International Academy of Art in Ramallah. Jarrar’s first exhibition was in public sites at the checkpoints of Howarra and Qalandia. He has directed several videos and films, including Journey 110.

Five years after the Oslo Accords were signed, moment at the Bethlehem checkpoint, five years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, tracing the futility of the "peace" accords, as restrictions of Palestinian freedom of movement remain stagnant. The quiet right before a storm, a dream deferred.

Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir has been working in independent film since 1994. Her first feature Salt of this Sea (2008) premiered at Cannes, and won the FIPRESCI Critics Award, and was the first feature film directed by a Palestinian woman and Palestine's 2008 Oscar Entry for Foreign Language Film. Her second feature, When I Saw You (2012) screened at the Berlinale and won numerous awards as well. The film's production was entirely Arab-financed with all Palestinian producers, marking a new trend in Arab cinema. Jacir has also directed several short films, including A Post Oslo History (1998), The Satellite Shooters (2001) and Like Twenty Impossibles (2003). Founder of Philistine Films, Annemarie teaches screenwriting and works as an editor and film curator, actively promoting independent cinema, training and working with fellow filmmakers. Most recently she wrote a script for Mira Nair and is in development on her next film.

During a residency at Al Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem in September and October 2009, the artist collective CAMP gave eight Palestinian families residing in East Jerusalem a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) CCTV camera that was installed on their own homes, (or in the case of evicted families on nearby houses), at a point of vantage. For once they were not the object of monitoring, surveilling and scrutiny, rather they were in control of the zooming and camera movement. The Neighbor before the House shows how before and after instrumental "surveillance", there is inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire and doubt that pervades the project of watching. In these specific times and places, camera movements and live commentary become ways in which Palestinian residents evaluate what can be seen, and speak about the nature of their distance from others.

CAMP (http://studio.camp) is a collaborative studio founded in Bombay in 2007. It combines software, open-access archives and public programming with broad interests in technology, film and theory. CAMP likes to work on long-term, complex projects that nest in their contexts. CAMP's projects have entered modern social and technical assemblies: energy, communication and surveillance systems, neighborhoods, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as not having a fixed function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity. CAMP’s work has been shown in prestigious venues across India, as well as the MoMA and the New Museum (New York), the Serpentine Galleries and Gasworks (London), Asia Art Archive and M+ (Hong Kong), and Documenta 13 (Kassel) and in the streets and markets of Bangalore, San Jose, Dakar, Mexico City, East Jerusalem, Delhi and Bombay. From their home base in Chuim village, Bombay, CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive http://pad.ma, the new cinema archive http://indiancine.ma, the Wharfage project on the Indian Ocean, and a constellation of other projects, events and symposia they host.

“The trees were our proxy immigrants, the forests our implantation. And while we assumed that a pinewood was more beautiful than a hill denuded by grazing flocks of goats and sheep, we were never exactly sure what all the trees were for. What we did know was that a rooted forest was the opposite landscape to a place of drifting sand, of exposed rock and red dirt blown by the winds. (from Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, New York: Albert Knopf, 1995: 5). From the Jewish National Fund’s forestation project of the land of Palestine, to realize the Zionist biblical imaginary of the Promised Land, to the PLO’s imagination of liberated Palestine by means of the PA’s neoliberal politics of State Building and the reinvention of Palestine. The talk examines the operations of the PA’s visual cultural regime and their coercive and normalizing effects, in reinventing visual identities in an anachronist rupture to the classical liberation history.

Yazid Anani was born in 1975, Ramallah. He is an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and the Master Program in Urban Planning and Landscape - Birzeit University, Palestine. Yazid Anani chaired the Academic Council of the International Art Academy Palestine 2010 - 2012. He is part of several collectives, and projects such as Decolonizing Architecture and Ramallah Syndrome and has curated and co-curated several projects such as Urban Cafés, Palestinian Cities - Visual Contention and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions of Cities Exhibition and took part in several art projects. Anani has lectured and published internationally on issues of architecture and urban transformations, colonial spaces and power relations, public art and public spaces and art education. He is also the director of Public Program at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah.

‘I am talking about images: the images I shot in the area for several years. This work is becoming a challenge for me today, at a time when the partition is seen as a “fait accompli” and when access to the territories is becoming increasingly difficult – I am thinking about Gaza’s inaccessibility, and the frustration that such images can generate. Images are now blocked, under control. In the West, we are not receiving any more images from Gaza or the Palestinian territories, after a period when we were fed a continual, orchestrated flow of such images.’  (Israël-Palestine, J’écris sur une frontière dont l’opacité bouleverse le regard (extract), Anne-Marie Filaire, May 2007).

In a dialogue with the exhibition Zone de sécurité temporaire (Temporary Security Zone) currently on display at the Fort Saint-Jean, photographer Anne-Marie Filaire will be in conversation with curator Rasha Salti to discuss the artistic work she has developed over fifteen years in “border” spaces and other “buffer areas” around the Middle-East.

From her first series initiated in 1993 in her native region of Auvergne, to her work in the volatile regions of the Middle East, Anne-Marie Filaire has been building a dense, engaged body of work, as rigorous as it is lyrical. Her photography, oriented towards the landscape, focuses particularly on the so-called “borderlands” and “buffer zones”, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, East Africa and Europe.

In 1999, she began a parallel project that took her to the Near East (Israel-Palestine), devoted to observing spaces as physical entities, charged with history over time. For nearly ten years, she continually roamed these territories, documenting them like a geographer, collecting the traces of time in these political landscapes in flux. Her research continued in other countries marked by their history and conflicts, such as Lebanon, Yemen, Eritrea and Cambodia. Continuing her work in the Arab world in 2007, she focused on adolescents, their environment and intimate spaces, in the United Arab Emirates and then in Palestine (Gaza). Gradually, this quest drew her to moving images and she conducted filmed interviews with youth in the Middle East (Egypt, Algeria), in the context of the revolutions. In 2012, she concluded this research with an important series on armoured doors in Algiers. Her final investigations in the Middle East brought her to the Jordan-Syrian border in 2014 where she photographed the Azraq Syrian refugee camp.

Even though the city of Nazareth features eminently in Christian history, the majority of its inhabitants in the present time are Muslim, while most of the land is owned by Christian institutions, a situation that has led to tension in the city’s day expansion. Set against the background of the riots surrounding a square that both Christians and Muslims lay claim to, director Hany Abu-Assad centers his film on two attendants of a gas service station who have been working there for decades, in the neighborhood where he spent his childhood. Nazareth 2000 is a caustic, insightful and witty portrait of a city embattled with the bankruptcy of politics and a demagoguery that invokes religious mythologies.

Hany Abu-Assad was born in Nazareth, Palestine in 1961. After having worked as an airplane engineer in The Netherlands for several years, Abu-Assad made the radical shift towards film, and produced the feature film Curfew, directed by Rashid Masharawi, in 1994. In 1998 he directed his first feature, The Fourteenth Chick, based on a script by writer Arnon Grunberg, followed by the documentary Nazareth 2000 (2000), next was his second feature Rana's Wedding (2002) and his second documentary Ford Transit (2002). In 2006, his nexy feature, Paradise Now, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film in that year. In 2011 Abu-Assad finished working on The Courier, a Hollywood movie starring Jeffery Dean Morgan, Til Schweiger and Mickey Rourke, and in 2013 he finished working on Omar, that won the Jury Prize in the competition of Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (OSCARS) for Best Foreign Language Film 2014 and won the Best Film at the Dubai Film Festival. In 2015 Abu-Assad completed his 6^th feature film The Idol a drama inspired by the incredible journey of the artist Mohammad Assaf, a singer from Gaza who won the Arab Idol show in 2013.

With Bashar Hasuneh, Laura Ribeiro, Ihab Jadallah

Ramallah-based filmmaker Jadallah engages critically and satirically with the unspoken meta-script of violence that shrouds representations of Palestine, all cast with good guys, bad guys, victims and witnesses. The Shooter is construed as a parody where Palestinians are consciously ‘performing’ the type-casting.

Ihab Jadallah is a Jerusalem-based Palestinian filmmaker and producer. He studied Audio-Visual Communication at Universidad CEU in Valencia, Spain, and then Filmmaking at the Escola de Cinema & Audiovisuales de Catalunya at the Universitat de Barcelona. He has written, directed, and produced several highly acclaimed short films and documentaries, including The Shooter (2007) and The Flower Seller (2010). He is currently working on Dead Sea, a full-length feature film. He also directed the video for the Copyleft art installation. In addition, Jadallah has produced Dag’aa (2016), the video work for artist Shadi Habib Allah and Post 93, a 3-channel video installation.

The meeting was complete chaos. Everyone was screaming and hardly listening

to each other as several topics about the camp were being raised and discussed intensely. The architect knew it would be difficult to bring up the idea of a new design for the school. Just as she was thinking that perhaps this was not the right time to have this discussion, a man looked at her and bluntly asked, “Who are you?”

“I am the architect.”

“Is this a joke? What do you want from us, Madame architect?”

She nervously responded, wishing she could escape from the room. “I was sent by UNRWA to work on a new design for the old boys’ school.”

A chorus of voices exclaimed: “What?!”

Sandi Hilal is an architect based in Bethlehem. She was consultant with the UNRWA on the camp improvement program, and visiting professor at Al-Quds/Bard University in Abu Dis-Jerusalem. She is a founder member, with Alessandro Petti, of Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR, http://www.decolonizing.ps), an architectural studio and art residency program based in Beit Sahour, Palestine that combines conceptual speculation and pragmatic spatial intervention, discourse and collective learning. Alongside art and architectural practice, Petti and Hilal are engaged in critical pedagogy, they are the founders of Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem (www.campusincamps.ps). Petti and Hilal co-authored the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) with Eyal Weizman, an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization. In 2006 Hilal obtained the title of research doctorate in Transborder policies for daily life in the University of Trieste. Her writing and projects have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Il Manifesto, Al Ayyam, Al- Quds, Art Forum, and Archis, among other places.

In deconstructing the world famous ‘Jaffa oranges’ brand and probing its iconographic history director, Eyal Sivan delves into orientalist fantasies of the Holy Land and the Zionist promise of a “desert” that colonists would be bringing to “bloom”. Sivan uses photographic and filmic archives, poems and paintings, to narrate the history that goes back to a once economically thriving Arab Jaffa, whose prolific and profit-generating orange groves attracted local and neighboring labor in droves for picking, packaging and export. After the Nakba and the expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Israeli state rebranded ‘Jaffa’ as a symbol of an Arab-free Israel. Sivan interviews historians, political analysts and workers, retracing how an orange harvest, once the site of a cooperation, transformed gradually into a symbol of the escalating conflict and war.

Born in Haifa, in 1964, Eyal Sivan has been living between France and Israel since 1985. Known for his controversial films, Sivan directed more than 10 worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. He is the founder and artistic director of the Paris-based documentary films production company momento! and the film distribution agency Scalpel. He is the founder and chief editor of South Cinema Notebooks, a journal of cinema and political critic edited by the Sapir Academic College in Israel where he lectures regularly. Presently Sivan in an Honorary Fellow at University of Exeter UK, he also teaches at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam and s member of the editorial board of the Paris-based publishing house La Fabrique Editions. His filmography includes: Aqabat-Jaber, Passing Through (1987), He Will Overcome (1993), The Specialist (1999), Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (co-directed with Michel Khleifi, 2003), I Love You All (2004), Common State, Potential Conversation (2012).

Emily Jacir will be threading her reflections on the questions of archives, translation and movement in her practice, through a number of her art projects, including her seminal installation, Material for a Film (2007), Lydda Airport (2009) and stazione (2009).

Emily Jacir, one of the Arab world's leading contemporary artists, has built a complex and compelling oeuvre that explores transformation, questions of translation, resistance and silenced historical narratives.  Her work investigates personal and collective movement and its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean space and time in particular between Italy and Palestine. Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize (2008); the Herb Alpert Award (2011); and the Rome Prize (2015).

Emily Jacir’s recent solo exhibitions include IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin (2016 - 2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat el-Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009). She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 including Palestine International Video Festival and Birzeit University. Over the past ten years Jacir has been a full-time professor and active member of the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah (the only Academic institution of its kind in the Arab world). She conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. She also curated a selection of shorts; Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 -1982) which went on tour in 2007. Jacir is on the faculty of Bard's summer MFA program. She lives in the Mediterranean.