JENIN, Palestinian Territories — A film festival opened on Thursday in a newly restored cinema in Jenin, a West Bank town battered by some of the worst violence of the 2000 Palestinian uprising.
The festival is the brainchild of German filmmaker Marcus Vetter and Ismael Khatib, a Palestinian man who donated his 11-year-old son’s organs to save Israeli children after the boy was shot dead by an Israeli soldier in 2005.
The two men previously collaborated on “Heart of Jenin,” a documentary film about Khatib’s decision to donate the organs as a gesture of peace during a devastating uprising that claimed thousands of lives.
“My son was shot in the street because there was no place to go,” Khatib told AFP at the opening of the cinema. “I wanted there to be a place where young people could go, a safe place, a normal place.”
In 2002 Jenin was the site of the fiercest battle of the uprising, when Israeli soldiers, backed by massive armoured bulldozers, went house-to-house, battling Palestinian militants holed up in the narrow alleys.
Fifty-four Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting.
In recent years the town has experienced a rebirth of sorts as Palestinian security forces have imposed law and order and Israel has lifted some of the hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks it maintains across the West Bank.
The new cinema is one of the first to open in the territory since the outbreak of the first intifada or uprising in 1987, when cinemas shut down as part of a general strike against the Israeli occupation.
The cinema was originally built in 1957, and in its restored form can seat 335 people inside and another 700 at an open-air screen outside.
Last summer a movie theatre opened in the West Bank town of Nablus, also a former militant stronghold that sent scores of suicide bombers into Israeli cities at the height of the uprising.
Vetter hopes the new cinema will be the first step in the development of a local film industry, where Palestinians can study all aspects of moviemaking and document their experience of the occupation.
“Imagine if the Palestinians could give something to others,” he told AFP. “Right now they are often only receiving.
“What makes you proud, what makes you strong, what helps you to overcome your own suffering is when you can help other people to develop as well.”
The three-day festival will show several documentaries about the conflict, including “To Shoot an Elephant” (2009) about the January 2009 Gaza War and “Arna’s Children” (2003), which follows a group of Palestinians from their childhood as actors in a theatre troupe in the Jenin refugee camp into the devastating early years of the uprising.
The idea for the cinema is loosely modelled on the troupe, which was originally established in the 1990s by a Jewish woman, Arna Mer Khamis, and then resurrected as the Freedom Theatre as the uprising wound down.
Zakaria Zubaidi, 33, one of the children depicted in the film who emerged as a senior militant commander during the battle for Jenin before laying down his arms in an amnesty agreement in 2005, attended the opening.
Like other Palestinians, he insisted that the opening of the cinema and the return to a more normal life in the town should not be seen as an indication that the occupation or the conflict with Israel has ended.
“The political position of any institution has to be clear — that we reject the occupation, recognition of Israel and the two-state solution,” he said.
“I don’t have any problem with the Jewish people. I would give my own heart to save a Jew. But if he is going to continue occupying us I will tear out his heart and his father’s heart as well.”
