By Peter Keough

At the Boston Palestine Film Festival: a recognition of what remains and a restoration of what is lost.

The Boston Palestine Film Festival. October 18 through 27 at various venues.

Last October, after Hamas terrorists murdered over 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 others, the Boston Palestine Film Festival decided to cancel its live screenings. Only the festival’s online program was made available, though a truncated version of the live program was screened three months later.

This year the festival returns to its live venues at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the Regent Theatre, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Meanwhile, the conflict unleashed in 2023 has intensified, killing over 40,000 Palestinians and spreading to Lebanon and perhaps beyond. The region and the world are in a far bleaker, more perilous place, perhaps beyond the power of cinema to console or comprehend.

Nonetheless, some of the documentaries in this year’s festival, all of which were made before the Gaza war, attempt to do just that. They seek to recover a lost, despoiled past by means of film, art, and memory.

A scene from Aida Returns. Photo: courtesy of BAM

And subterfuge. In Carol Mansour’s Aida Returns (screens October 19 at 3 p.m. at the MFA) the immediate loss is the death of the filmmaker’s mother Aida, who had suffered from Alzheimer’s in her last years. Despite this, she still clung to memories of her hometown of Yafa (now Jaffa), from which her family, along with the entire Palestinian population, was expelled during the Nakba by the Israeli army during the War of Independence. Aida eventually settled in Montreal, and four years after her death her daughter arranges for a friend to transport her ashes back to the city where they hope to scatter them — covertly, since it is apparently illegal for exiled Palestinians to return to Yafa, even after death.

The result is an inventively told heist film of sorts, which involves Mansour observing and directing her friend’s mission from her office via a split screen and the use of multiple cell phone cameras, some with fading batteries. It includes heartbreaking portraits of Aida in her youth and being interviewed in her last illness and a funny, poignant exchange with an inquisitive customs agent. There is humor and sorrow, but the depth of the historical tragedy and its often forgotten human cost is ever present.

A scene from Bye Bye Tiberias. Photo: Girls on Tops

In Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias (screens October 20 at 3 p.m. at the MFA) the filmmaker returns with her mother, the actress Hiam Abbass (The Lemon Tree; HBO’s Succession) to Deir Hanna, the village near the lake of the title (also known as the Sea of Galilee) where her mother was born and her grandmother still lives. Abbass herself is an exile, but she left not because she was expelled by the Israelis but because she felt suffocated by her parents’ desire that she become a lawyer or doctor. Instead she fled to Paris in her 20s to begin her acting career.

Intercut with this visit are photos and archival footage telling the story of Abbass’s grandmother, who was forced to flee on foot with her family to Lebanon during the Nakba in 1948. One of her aunts was separated from the family and ended up in Syria, and, in a moving sequence, Abbass describes her reunion with her lost relative after a 30-year separation. There is also recurrent home video of a visit Soualem had made to the lake with her mother as a child in 1992, a kind of idyllic interlude in the midst of the personal and historic chaos and conflict. In the end Abbass stands on a hilltop outside Tiberias and points out the borders of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, indicating that despite such national divisions the bonds of family persist.

A scene from Lyd: an animated Hannah Arendt Lecture Hall.

Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland’s Lyd (screens October 20 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre followed by Q&A with the directors — unfortunately the event is already sold out) takes an unconventional approach in relating the story of the former Palestinian city of the title, now the Israeli city of Lod. Told in voice-over by the city itself (actress Maisaa Abd El-Hadik), it argues how over its 5,000 year existence it has been ruled by many occupiers, from the Roman Empire to the British Mandate, and how, had a revolt in the 1930s by Palestinians against the latter not failed, an alternative history might have ensued in which a tolerant, multicultural city could have been founded in an enlightened Palestinian nation.

By means of animation the film recreates a version of that rosy, speculative Lyd, a vision that is disrupted by the intrusion of harsh realities such as archival footage of a massacre perpetrated by Israeli troops in 1948 and a 1980s interview with some of the perpetrators. The animated utopia finally shatters with the outbreak of deadly riots in 2021 that included the death of an Arab and an Israeli citizen. (That tragedy, after which the surviving families put aside their differences and bonded in grief, is the subject of Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia’s provocative and moving 2023 documentary Mourning in Lod )

A scene from No Other Land.

In contrast to the films that lament the loss of what Palestinians once had, No Other Land (screens October 23 at 7 p.m.at the Regent Theatre), a collective Palestinian-Israeli effort by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, dramatizes the persistence of Adra and other activists in hanging onto what they still possess.

The son of a veteran Palestinian activist, Adra has been fighting to save his community Masafer Yatta from mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. The IDF has declared their property to be the site of a military base and repeatedly — and without warning — raze houses and other buildings. Having exhausted legal appeals, Adra, aided by the Israeli journalist Abraham, now records the demolitions and increasingly hostile clashes with the military and illegal settlers and posts them on his website.

In first person, as-it-happened footage with occasional archival footage, the film suspensefully relates how Adra, his father, and the other villagers again and again confront those destroying their homes and property, risking arrest and worse (one of the protestors is shot and paralyzed and forced to live in a cave). Their struggle is fraught with dread and anxiety, and, despite a few sparks of humor, the unhappy ending is never in doubt. As the epilogue shows, the production concludes just as the invasion of Gaza begins.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).