At the Boston Palestine Film Fest, the battle over the narrative plays out onscreen

The 17th annual Boston Palestine Film Festival was supposed to take place in October. Then came Hamas’ brutal surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and everything was upended. As Israel launched a large-scale invasion of Gaza, the festival’s organizers made the difficult decision to postpone in-person screenings. “At the end of the day, it felt very wrong to gather in a cinema and watch a movie while our families, our loved ones, our direct connections are being killed on a daily basis,” programming director Michael Maria, who has family in the West Bank, told me.

There had been security concerns, too. “The heightened sensitivity, the safety of our own audience,” Maria said, “and understanding that there could be a backlash.”

More than three months later, the picture is different — in most ways, worse. The Palestinian death toll recently passed 25,000, according to the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip. More than 1,300 Israelis have been killed in the conflict and more than 100 hostages remain captives of Hamas. International health officials warned of impending famine and the spread of disease in Gaza as food and water shortages worsen.

Amid this bleak reality, the film festival returned with three screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston over the weekend (Jan. 19-20) and one planned for Thursday, Jan. 25, at MassArt. (Tickets for the documentary, “Notes on Displacement,” are sold out.) The January roster omitted one film, a comedy called “The Gaza Weekend” that was originally scheduled for October.

The festival did not seem to be the lightning rod organizers feared; in fact, the conflict appeared to have increased interest, with the first screening selling out days in advance, according to Maria. The MFA’s Remis Auditorium was packed for the festival’s kickoff screening of “Alam (the Flag),” the debut feature-length film from Palestinian director Firas Khoury. The audience skewed young and many wore the black-and-white keffiyeh in solidarity with Palestinians. The atmosphere was warm and convivial, though plenty of security was on hand.

“Alam” was by far the best film I saw that weekend. It depicts the political awakening of a Palestinian teenager, Tamer, who lives in an Arab enclave in Israel. Tamer, portrayed with wry sweetness by Mahmood Bakri, is aimless, the kind of boy who gets in trouble for passive acts of rebellion like cutting class. He is an aesthete, perhaps a budding artist, who lives by himself in an old family home once occupied by his grandfather, while his family lives in a more modern apartment nearby; his desire for solitude suggests a deep interior well, and also, a lot of free-floating adolescent horniness. Tamer spends his days listlessly, watching porn and rummaging through his grandfather’s possessions, which retain the decaying decadence of a lost era. Though politically apathetic, he chafes at the oppressiveness of his environment, evoked in scenes framed low and close so that you hardly ever glimpse the sky. Tamer’s world is tightly circumscribed, a city of narrow alleys, desolate squares and unspoken thoughts — a setup that pays off gloriously in the film’s final breathtaking shot.

Tamer’s trajectory changes when he develops a crush on a beautiful and politically engaged classmate, Maysaá. She recruits him in a plot to replace the Israeli flag that flies over the school with a Palestinian one. It is the eve of the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, which refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The clandestine operation is marred by a combination of youthful incompetence and anxiety about getting caught — an amusing episode that provides an antidote to the film's underlying tension.

There are genuine reasons for Tamer to be nervous to make even a symbolic gesture of rebellion like flying a flag. In “Alam,” to assert Palestinian identity in public — that is, to speak freely — is to risk not merely censure but death, a possibility the film makes devastatingly clear in a shocking denouement. For the most part, conflict plays out in the battleground of words and ideas. One of the film’s most affecting scenes occurs when another student, Safwat (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), takes issue with the way a teacher describes the historical events of 1948, quibbling about the difference between “running away” and “being expelled.”

“This is the Zionist story, not our story,” Safwat says. His own family, he explains, was driven out of Deir Yassin, which was the site of an Israeli massacre of Palestinians in 1948. “I’m not allowed to mark the Nakba!” Safwat says, his voice rising. “I’m not allowed to study it.”

How information is shared with children and taught at schools came up in all three movies screened over the weekend. In “Mediterranean Fever,” the main character’s son avoids geography class after an argument with his teacher about the history of Palestinians in Israel. In “A House in Jerusalem,” a father’s response to his young daughter’s questions about how the family acquired their house in Israel is evasive; he says simply that her grandfather bought it from the government, eliding the story of the Palestinian family that lived in the home before Israeli soldiers drove them out.

What words are used to describe certain traumas, and whose narrative rules the day: these are questions that are now being adjudicated in the International Court of Justice as South Africa brings a case against Israel, accusing it of genocide. Meanwhile, Jewish antiwar groups in Israel struggle to secure permits to stage protests and face police violence for speaking against the war. Even in the U.S., the battle over the story plays out dramatically, sometimes with material consequences for those critical of Israel, as was the case for several American law students who signed pro-Palestinian statements, an Irish CEO who criticized Israel on X (formerly Twitter) and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire.

Of course, public pressure is not at all the same as political repression. But in such a heightened atmosphere, a flag becomes so weighted with symbolism it can obscure the people it represents. “Alam” is very much concerned with the meaning we ascribe to certain symbols and words, the difference between propaganda and lived experience, and the preciousness of an individual life. It seeks to tell a story, not a fable, about the circumstances that might lead someone to raise a flag.

That, arguably, is the festival’s aim as well. “What’s the role of festivals during times of trauma and tragedy?” Maria wondered at the beginning of our interview. Later, he offered an answer. “It’s a way for a community to gather with one another, but also just for experiencing filmmaking that can move you, that can inform you, that can make you see new perspectives, drive better understanding,” he said. “Especially when it comes to Israel and Palestine, where, even today, Americans still don't really understand the context.”

About halfway through “Alam,” Tamer joins a small band of protestors as they confront a group of Israeli tourists in a state forest. The trees were planted by the Jewish National Fund, but a protester tells the visitors that the remnants of six evacuated Palestinian villages can still be found. “What you heard is a lie,” he declares. “The remains of houses you can see: each is a family that dreams of coming back.” There is urgency in his voice — not to intimidate, but to communicate. In the forest it’s possible to read a different story, if you dare to look.