Magnificent7 Diary/ 3
The organisers estimated that 1500 attended the screening of Mahdi Fleifel’s ”A World not Ours” in the big hall of the Sava Centre. The director entered the stage with festival director Zoran Popovic and took a photo that he wants to send to his mother in Denmark, the country in the cold North that his family moved to after leaving the refugee camp Ain el-Helweh in the south of Lebanon. The camp that is the location of his film where he goes back on holidays to meet friends and the part of the family that has remained there, first of all his charismatic 80 year old grandfather. The main character of the film is Abu Eyad, a friend of the director, whose doubt about the way Palestinian politics is being performed becomes the red thread of the warm and humorous story as it unfolds with shootings of today and archive material shot first of all by the father of the director.
The audience included a big group of ambassadors and diplomats from the Arabic countries, headed by the Palestinian Ambassador Mr Mohammed K. M. Nabhan, whose first reaction to the film was ”this is my story”. On the photo that I took on behalf of Mahdi Fleifel the ambassador is the third from the right, Fleifel second from left.
At the dinner I sat next to the brother of the Ambassador, who expressed the wish that the film could be shown in Ramallah as Palestinians living there actually know very little about the many refugee camps. He and his brother, who lives in Sweden for 25 years, told me that they are 7 brothers and 2 sisters, spread all over the world, speaking, if you add it up, 11 languages!
Mahdi Fleifel and his team has started an Academy Award Campaign: Please help us qualify our critically acclaimed documentary for Oscars 2015 consideration. Here is the link to know more:
http://www.aflamnah.com/en/a-world-not-ours-academy-award-campaign/
Tonight the film at the Magnificent7 festival is ”My Fathers, My Mother and Me” – German title ”Meine Keine Familie”, read below.
