Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi receives Joseph Plateau Honorary Award at 51st edition Film Fest Gent
At the 51st edition of Film Fest Gent, Palestinian film writer and director Michel Khleifi received a Joseph Plateau Honorary Award, in recognition of his exceptional work that challenges both artistic and political boundaries. The Belgium-based filmmaker received the award after a retrospective of his work and a Director’s Talk.
On Thursday 10 October, Film Fest Gent honoured director Michel Khleifi with a Joseph Plateau Honorary Award, a prize for festival guests who have made significant contributions to the art of filmmaking. The award was presented after a Director’s Talk, a one-on-one conversation with the filmmaker about his decennia-spanning career, in between the screenings of his three most notable films, recently restored by CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.
Among these was his debut Fertile Memory (1981), a hybrid film that demonstrates how the Israeli occupation shapes the personal lives and opinions of two very different Palestinian women. In his 1985 short film Ma’loul fête sa destruction (1985) - also part of this selection - Khleifi returns to the occupied region to capture a unique event in the northern city of Ma’loul, where former Palestinian inhabitants are allowed to return to their hometown once a year. In Noce en Galilée (1987), the third film screened within this retrospective, an Arab patriarch makes a deal with the Israelian governors to enable the marriage of his son despite the curfew. This film not only marked Khleifi’s international breakthrough, it was also the first ever Palestinian film to be screened at the Cannes film festival, where it received the International Critics Prize. At the special request of Khleifi, Gillo Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (1985) was also part of the programme.
Shedding light on the ongoing occupation, the retrospective of Khleifi’s work offers an alternative route into the complexities of the conflict. Through the art of cinema he offers insight not only into the historical roots of the occupation, but also into the recent escalations in the region and the attacks on Palestinian territory.
"Ideological history has to do with power. Emotional history shows something much more real. Cinema is a poetic art, not a realistic one. If a film is completely realistic, something is wrong." Director Michel Khleifi during his Director’s Talk
Michel Khleifi
Born in Nazareth to a Palestinian family, Michel Khleifi moved to Belgium in the 1970s, where he started studying film and theatre direction at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle (INSAS). After a few television reports in the 1980s, Khleifi travelled to his homeland to shoot his first feature film, Fertile Memory (1981). It was the first ever feature film shot at the Palestinian West Bank and the start of a career of eight politically engaged films about the injustices taking place on occupied Palestinian land. After making the short Ma’loul fête sa destruction (1985), he made his fiction debut Noce en Galilée (1987), which was awarded the International Critics Prize in Cannes and the Golden Shell in San Sebastián. In the 1990s and 2000s he continued making politically committed films, including Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land (1999), a documentary about mixed Arabic-Jewish couples and their day to day difficulties, and Tale of the Three Jewels (1995), about a young Palestinian boy who escapes the violence of both the present and the past through his imagination. For Zindeeq (2009), his latest film to date, he received the award for Best Arab Feature Film at the Dubai International Film Festival. The past decade, Khleifi has taught film direction at INSAS in Brussels, Columbia University, St Joseph University in Beirut and AM Qattan Foundation in Palestine and Jordan. More background on Khleifi’s career and work is available on the website of film journal Sabzian.
Joseph Plateau Honorary Award
The Joseph Plateau Honorary Award is presented to distinguished guests of Film Fest Gent whose achievements have earned them a special and distinct place in the history of international filmmaking. The award itself is a replica of professor Joseph Plateau’s phenakistiscope, the device he designed to illustrate his theory of the persistence of vision, which became the basic principle behind the idea of ’moving images’. On the opening night, actress Emily Watson (Small Things Like These) also received a Joseph Plateau Honorary Award.
Past winners include amongst others Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (2023), Terence Davies (2023), Céline Sciamma (2022), Raoul Servais (2022), Andrea Arnold (2021), Viggo Mortensen (2020), Isabelle Huppert (2011), Agnès Varda (2006) and Morgan Freeman (2000). The full list of winners is available on the website.