Ali Suliman Articles

Team Qatar by Liz Mermin (top); Hiam Abbass in Najwa Najjar's Pomegranates and Myrrh (bottom) Doha Tribeca Film Festival Executive Director Amanda Palmer and Robert De Niro handed out two audience awards, worth US$50,000 each, at the festival's closing night gala on Nov. 1. Coincidentally, both winning films were directed by women. British filmmaker Liz Mermin's documentary Team Qatar, which chronicles the creation of that [...]

Based on actual events, Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree (no connection to Sandy Tolan's novel The Lemon Tree), which opens today in the Los Angeles area, chronicles a Palestinian widow's fight to prevent the Israeli army from razing her lemon grove. The problem is that all those lemon trees are located right next door to the brand new house — actually, "fortress" would be a better [...]

LEMON TREE: Q&A with Eran Riklis Part I Along those lines, the men in charge in Lemon Tree don't come across in a very positive light. A bossy male security agent demands the destruction of the lemon grove. A bossy Palestinian man threatens Salma because of her relationship with her lawyer. The defense minister is obsessed with his career and may be having an affair [...]

The 4th Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, which runs April 23-30, will kick off with a screening of Joshua Sinclair's Jump, starring Ben Silverstone (of the coming-of-age gay drama Get Real) and Patrick Swayze. Jump will screen on Thursday, April 23, at 8:00 pm at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. Based on a real story, the film (co-written by Sinclair and Ryan James) [...]