1 Land 2 Cinemas

Save the date May 6th 5pm in Room 345 Penn Museum for a presentation with CEE Spring Fellow Ra'anan Alexandrowicz and Ian Lustick. Check back here for more info soon! 

The history of the Israeli - Palestinian conflict is entangled with the history of cinema. Over the last century and a half, two separate cinematic traditions developed in Palestine/Israel. Sometimes negating and sometimes complimenting each other, Israeli and Palestinian cinemas make up a unique case in which there are two separate cinematic narratives for one land. For our Final Fellows presentation with Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, in coversation with Ian Lustic, we explore whether cinema is a reflection of the painful reality of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict or a central driver of it. Provoked by the unbearable live streamed horror images out of Gaza,Israel and the West Bank, Ian and Ra'anan will revisit earIy cinematic images of Palestine and consider them in juxtaposition with historical events. Co-sponsored by Penn Anthropology. 

Dr. Ian Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania.  He teaches Middle Eastern politics, comparative politics, and computer modeling. He is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Sciences Research Council.  Before coming to Penn he taught for fifteen years at Dartmouth College and worked for one year in the Department of State. His present research focuses on the implications of the disappearance of the option of a negotiated “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and techniques of counterfactual forecasting. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Among his books are Arabs in the Jewish State (1980); For the Land and the Lord (1988, 1994); Unsettled States, Disputed Lands (1993); Trapped in the War on Terror (2006); and Paradigm Lost (2019).

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​Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is an Israeli filmmaker and screenwriter currently living in Philadelphia . Some of his achievments include  the Grand Jury Award at Sundance and a Peabody award for his experimental documentaries that deal with the violence, ethical suspensions, and military, legal, and visual frameworks underlying the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel). Films include The Inner Tour, The Law in These Parts and The Viewing Booth.