Friday, February 12, 2016
6:00 – 8:00 p.m. EST*
The Jerusalem Fund
6:00 – 8:00 p.m. EST*
The Jerusalem Fund
Trip Along Exodus explores the last 70 years of Palestinian politics through the prism of the life of Dr. Elias Shoufani, who was a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He was an academic and leftist intellectual who was one of the leaders of the opposition to Arafat within Fatah. Born in Ma’liya in the Galilee and educated at the Hebrew University and Princeton, the multilingual and erudite Dr. Shoufani was also the Arab world’s leading analyst of Israeli affairs for more than a generation. His opposition to policies meant to lead toward a two-state solution was grounded in his political clarity and prescience about the direction in which Israel was headed and his understanding that the two-state solution would never actually be allowed to be realized.
To try and understand his choice to give up a tenured position at a university in the U.S. and join the underground PLO in Beirut, his daughter, the filmmaker, made a documentary that traced her family’s journey through Palestine’s 20th century history. It starts in Palestine in 1948 and ends in current day war-torn Syria, traveling through Washington DC, NYC, the Galilee (Israel), Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
In recreating Palestinian history, the film uses archival footage, poetry, family photos/8mm films, glitter, cartoons, animation, macro-photography, interviews, and multimedia formats in a video-art style that produces both a personal and political memoir.
2015. 120 minutes.
About the Director
Hind Shoufani is a Palestinian filmmaker and poet. A Fulbright scholar with an MFA in filmmaking from NYU, she has been working in the film/TV and literature worlds for seventeen years. She has been a producer, director, editor, translator and performance poet in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Dubai, NYC and other places. Trip Along Exodus is her first feature documentary.
