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Palestine Blues

A person reaching a hand towards the camear
April 26, 2025 - 7:30 pm
In-person: 
Q&A with Nida Sinnokrot, director of "Palestine Blues" and Associate Professor in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT, moderated by Saree Makdisi, Chair of the UCLA Department of English.


Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

A Phantom Hill

El Chinero: Un cerro fantasma, Mexico, 2022

Bani Khoshnoudi’s haunting experimental short El Chinero bears witness to Chinese and Asian migrants believed to have perished on a hill of the same name in California’s Baja region in 1916. Silent text gives way to a thunderous score and textured 16mm desert images that reconstruct memory from absence. Shot with a Bolex camera and assembled by hand, the film meditates on historical erasure and the land’s power to testify when the archive cannot.

DCP, b&w, 11 min. Director: Bani Khoshnoudi.

Palestine Blues

U.S./Palestine, 2006

This urgent, poetic documentary captures the resistance of Palestinian farmers in the village of Jayyous as Israel’s separation wall threatens their survival. Shot in a guerilla-style of cinéma vérité that heightens dramatic tension, the film largely forgoes narration, opting instead to let the voices and struggles of Jayyous’ citizens, some of whom are director Nida Sinnokrot’s relatives, speak for themselves. Palestine Blues is an intimate, deeply human portrait of resilience in the face of displacement and occupation.Public Programmer Beandrea July

DCP, color, 72 min. Director: Nida Sinnokrot.

Watch the trailer:


Special thanks to our community partners: Consortium for Palestine Studies at UCLA, Los Angeles FilmforumUCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

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