By PETER CALDER
At a showing of a foreign film in a film festival, the foyer is always crowded with natives of the film's country of origin. They're easily spotted by the excited babble of anticipation at the prospect of seeing their homeland on screen. Sometimes, too, you can pick them by the eye-rollingly bored expressions of their New Zealand-born children, creeping like snails unwillingly to a reminder of their cultural heritage.
Nadra Zarifeh, the director of the Date Palm Film Festival, which opens in Auckland this week, saw plenty of evidence of film's attraction to immigrant communities in the festival's recent seasons in Wellington and Christchurch.
But she was puzzled at the poor attendances for the Israeli film, James' Journey to Jerusalem, which is the festival's opening-night attraction. The film, whose lead actor, Siyabonga Shibe, was singled out for praise by the jury at last year's Jerusalem Film Festival, depicts a wide-eyed African Christian pilgrim who makes the journey to the Holy Land on behalf of his village. He is held by suspicious immigration officials who then accept bribes to release him into the care of a man who exploits illegal migrant labour.
It's a sobering but ultimately upbeat portrait of a worldwide problem and no reasonable reading of it could find that it targeted Israel. But Jewish audiences shunned the screenings in Wellington and Zarifeh heard on the grapevine that it was because they saw the film as anti-Israeli or worse.
"I was surprised," she says. "It is an Israeli film, but it is the Israelis taking a poke at themselves while at the same time lifting the veil on an international dilemma, the plight of the illegal immigrant."
The documentary Jenin, Jenin, which looks at the April 2002 attack on the Palestinian refugee camp of the title, is likely to be equally controversial. And that's ironic given that Zarifeh, Christchurch-born of a Palestinian father, started the festival as a response to the anti-Muslim hysteria generated since September 2001. "I was motivated by the portrayal in the mainstream media, mainly of Arabs, I guess but of the whole Middle East."
The festival includes plenty of politically-charged non-fiction material including sustained interviews (in two films) with Noam Chomsky and a documentary on an Israeli physicians' organisation working to protect the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories.
But there is also a range of features from Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. That wider catchment explains why Zarifeh changed the name of the festival which started last year, in Wellington alone, as the Middle Eastern Film Festival. It was also hard to get sponsorship for any event with "Middle East" in the title, she says, "because everyone thought it was all doom and gloom."
The week-long festival will take place at the Capitol Cinema in Balmoral.
On screen
* What: Date Palm Film Festival
* Where and when: Capitol Cinema, 610 Dominion Rd, Sep 16-20
* Date Palm Film Festival
An immigrant's plight revealed in close-up
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