Daytime Film: “The Dupes” by Tawfik Saleh

The Cultural Programs, as part of the Daytime Film Series, presents

The Dupes
by Tawfik Saleh

30 January 2013
At The Palestine Center

 

The Dupes

The Dupes, one of the first Arab films to address the Palestinian question, is a stark and stately black-and white film that traces the destinies of three different men brought together by their dispossession, their despair, and their hope for a better future.

The time is the 1950s, the place is Iraq, and the protagonists are Palestinian refugees trying to cross the border into Kuwait concealed in the steel tank of a truck. Each one believes he can make a new life for himself, but as the film title suggests, their flight is no solution.

The story is based on the 1962 novella Men in the Sun by Palestinian writer, artist, and resistance leader Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated at age 36 with his young niece, presumably by the Israeli Mossad, in a car bombing in Beirut in 1972.”
-Boston Palestine Film Festival