From Third to Third World Cinema: Film Circuits and the Institutionalization of Palestinian Cinema

IN 1977, THE PCI produced the film Palestinian Visions (Ru ‘a Filastiniyah) about the Palestinian artist Ibrahim Ghannam. Directed by ‘Adnan Madanat, with a scenario by Madanat and artist Mona Saudi, the thirty-minute film profiles the artist and his creative works (paintings, poetry, and music). Most of the film consists of footage of Ghannam’s paintings in which the camera traverses across the canvasses, highlighting details from the ethnographic tableaux. Taken from his memories of life in the villages of Yajur and al-Tirah in the Galilee, where he and his family lived before 1948, the detailed paintings are careful renderings of