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Toronto Palestine Film Festival

TORONTO PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL at various venues from Saturday (October 2) to October 8. tpff.ca. See listings.


The Toronto Palestine Film Festival celebrates its third anniversary with an ambitious slate of features and documentaries. As always, the focus is on the social and political situation on the ground in the Middle East, but as filmmakers mature, their films are growing more artful, moving away from the didacticism that defined early Palestinian cinema.

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Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains (Saturday, 6:30 pm, Bloor, rating: NNN) played the Toronto Film Festival last year but hasn’t managed to pop out into commercial release yet. A semi-autobiographical series of vignettes about Palestinian life from 1948 to the present, it plays exactly like Suleiman’s previous feature, Divine Intervention, with the director using his characters as long-suffering Buster Keaton figures trudging uphill against endless inconveniences.

Eyal Sivan’s engaging documentary Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork (October 7, 7 pm, Innis Town Hall, rating: NNNN) looks at one of Israel’s most famous exports, finding in the Jaffa orange a perfect metaphor for Palestinian alienation.

Kamal Aljafari’s Port Of Memory (Wednesday, 9 pm, Jackman Hall, rating: NNNN) debuted earlier this spring at Images. It finds an angle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that isn’t often explored. The quasi-fictional story examines the efforts of an Arab man – the director’s uncle, playing a version of himself – to hold onto his Jaffa home after he and his family are classified as squatters.

Aljafari tells the story in elliptical movements, less concerned with legal process than with capturing a mood of confusion and loss. It’s a quiet piece, but no less effective for its subtle treatment of a subject that almost always involves people shouting past one another.

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