Actors Mahmoud Bakri (center) and Muhammed Abed El Rahman (right) from a scene in Farah Nabulsi’s film “The Teacher.” Nabulsi will be in town later this month for a screening of the film at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, which kicked off Saturday and continues until May 4. This is the 23rd year the festival has been held.
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Nick Leffel didn’t know who he was for most of his life. He’s still not completely sure, although he’s been getting closer to finding out.
Olive-complected with coarse black hair, he ruled out being 100% white like his “all-American” adoptive parents while growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. As the years went by, he also had doubts his biological mother and father had ancestral ties in Russia, where he was born.
Brown, rooted in Islam and somewhere in the Middle East, was Leffel’s best eventual multi-pronged guess. The Ukrainian Village resident nearly hit the bull’s-eye, according to the results of a DNA kit he recently took. Not only did the test determine Leffel likely has Syrian blood coursing through his veins, it also revealed part of his lineage could be traced back to Afghanistan or neighboring Tajikistan.
“It’s been life-changing,” the young filmmaker said of uncovering his cultural heritage.
Leffel’s thoughts seem to permeate through the Arabic-speaking protagonist of his short film “Dakhla” when the man wonders, “Can one feel nostalgia for a land one has never known?” But Leffel said the piece, set in Guadalajara, Mexico, is more of a nod to the thousands of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa region, including his long-distant Palestinian cousins, who are currently living in Jordan.
“Dakhla” is one of 21 films that will be featured at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, which kicks off this weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Like Leffel, not all filmmakers participating in the 15-day event are of Palestinian descent, but their art reclaims and champions narratives that have been defiled by those who have a Pavlovian tendency to think terrorists — not innocent civilians — when they visualize Palestinian men, women and children.
“It falls on us to undo the propaganda that has been spewed about us,” said Brooklyn-based Munir Atalla, who will be accepting the “Spirit of Palestine” award at the festival for his eight-minute tribute to his grandfather’s cousin, abstract painter and activist Samia Halaby.
Indiana University, where 87-year-old Halaby taught and received a master’s degree, in December abruptly canceled a planned exhibit on her artwork, citing security concerns and the Jerusalem-born Halaby’s social media posts expressing solidarity with her fellow Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The snubs against students, faculty members and alumni who have spoken out against Israel’s disproportionately brutal response to the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack have become commonplace on college campuses across the country. Just last week, more than 100 protesters at Columbia University in New York were arrested, and at the University of Southern California, its pro-Palestinian valedictorian Asna Tabassum was informed she would no longer be giving a commencement speech on graduation day.
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival, now in its 23rd year, has always served as antidote to those reprimands and provides larger context to Palestinian-Israeli relations in ways that higher education institutions have often failed.
Dissent over Israel’s nearly seven-month siege on Gaza — a “humanitarian hellscape,” per United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres — has helped pique interest in this year’s festival, which includes post-film discussions. But there’s also a deep yearning to salute Palestinian “joy and resilience,” said Nina Shoman-Dajani, the festival’s executive director.
Ticket sales went so fast for opening night on Saturday, organizers scheduled an encore screening for “Bye Bye Tiberias,” filmmaker Lina Soualem’s documentary on her mother, “Succession” and “Ramy” actress Hiam Abbass, and the Palestinian village she left behind. That showing had sold out, too.
Also sold out is the April 30 presentation of “The Teacher,” a movie that infuses many of the inequities British Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi witnessed during her numerous visits to the occupied West Bank.
While shooting in the Palestinian village of Burin, Israeli settlers set fire to the community’s olive trees — a form of “economic and environmental terrorism” that has incapacitated Palestinians for decades, Nabulsi said. She ended up emulating the fiery image for a crucial scene.
“That landscape of oppression, discrimination and control almost emerges as a character itself, a villain perhaps …” Nabulsi said.
Nabulsi and her peers find the pressure to portray ongoing Palestinian sadness and oppression limiting, but they also understand that films, as a “soft power,” can sway “public opinion and policy by showcasing the human cost of conflict.”
When Nabulsi’s BAFTA-award winning, Oscar-nominated short film, “The Present,” started streaming on Netflix, many viewers, unsettled by the depiction of Palestinian suffering at Israeli checkpoints, educated themselves further, prompting “regret over previously not understanding the depth of the issues or the Palestinians struggle for freedom,” Nabulsi said.
There’s always more to the story as Leffel has found digging for information about his background, which is the subject of “Badistan,” the movie project he’s currently working on.
Leffel’s parents have been supportive as he keeps peeling back the layers and learning more.
It will be Leffel’s story to tell, but he hopes more people will be ready to open their hearts and listen.
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board.
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