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S y n o p s i s
Occupied Palestine: A serene landscape now pockmarked by military checkpoints. When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people.
like twenty impossibles
a film by Annemarie Jacir
[35mm color - 17:00 - Dolby SR - 1:1.85 - in Arabic, English, & Hebrew w/English subtitles - 2003 - Palestine]
STARRING
REEM ABU-SBAIH, ISMAIL DABBAGH, RAJA'I KHATEEB, RAMI MUSSALEM, SHADI ZUMORROD, ASHRAF ABU MOCH
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILLIPE BELLAICHE
MUSICAL SCORE: KAMRAN RASTEGAR
SOUND DESIGN: BILL TOLES
EDITED BY ANNEMARIE JACIR
SCREENPLAY BY ANNEMARIE JACIR AND KAMRAN RASTEGAR
WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY ANNEMARIE JACIR
Awards & Distinctions
- World Premiere, Cannes Film Festival, Official Selection, Cinéfondation
- National Finalist - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Student Academy Awards
- Best Short Screenplay - Nantucket Film Festival
- Best Short Film - Palm Springs International Short Film Festival
- Best Short Film (Emerging Narrative) - IFP/New York
- Silver Plaque - Chicago International Film Festival
- Best Short Film - Institute Du Monde Arabe Biennial
- Audience Choice Award - Polo Ralph Lauren Columbia University Festival
- Special Jury Prize - Ramallah International Film Festival
- Best Films of the Year list, 2003 - Film Comment Magazine
- 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema, 2004 - Filmmaker Magazine
Other Major Festivals
- Locarno Film Festival, Official Selection
- Edinburgh International Film Festival, Official Selection
- Telluride Film Festival, Official Selection
- New York Film Festival, Official Selection
- Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Czech Republic
- Hamptons International Film Festival, Official Selection
- Aspen Shortsfest, Official Selection
- Fajr International Film Festival, Iran
- Sarajevo Film Festival, Bosnia
- Florida Film Festival, Official Selection
- Carthage Film Festival (Journees Cinematographique de Carthage), Tunis
- Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival, France
Press
"like twenty impossibles is grippingly suspenseful while also satirizing the power imbalances inherent in political filmmaking" - FILMMMAKER
"Succint and powerful" - FILM COMMENT
"Blurs the line between truth and fiction to tell a story of art bowed but not defeated by the routine violence of Israeli occupation" - SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
"Like the politics it discusses, it is resolutely, and brilliantly, inconclusive" - TIME OUT
"Compared in some quarters to Pontecorvo's also pseudo-documentary The Battle of Algiers, this is obviously more compact and yet, in its necessary absence of character development and visual brutality, equally devasting in condemnation - BLUE JAI ARTS
"A Palestinian film crew attempting to pass a military checkpoint into Jerusalem encounters firsthand the insidious nature of oppression in the lyrical and unnerving faux documentary like twenty impossibles - NASHVILLE NEWS
"In Jacir's Kiarostamian like twenty impossibles, we are left with unnerving silence" - THE VILLAGE VOICE
It is a thousand times easier for you
To pass an elephant through the needle's eye.
To catch fried fish in the Milky Way...
A thousand times easier
Than smoldering with your oppression
The spark of an idea.
Like twenty impossibles
We shall remain.
-Tawfiq Zayyad, 1965