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.

Join us on April 18th and meet CAMRA Director Astrid Pickenpack and crew to learn about this years SSMF theme and see what the festival has planned this year.


" What can loss give us? "
" How do practices of ressurrection and necromancy act to rewrite endings? "

Join us on Thursday April 25th at Rainy Museum for a screening of Tukdam: Between Worlds with filmmaker and scholar Donagh Coleman.

In what Tibetans call tukdam, deceased meditators show no signs of death for days or weeks. Juxtaposing ground-breaking scientific research and Tibetan perspectives, this creative documentary challenges our notions of life and death, and where we draw the line between them. 

Finnish-Irish-American filmmaker-scholar Donagh Coleman holds degrees in Philosophy and Psychology and Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley. Previous award-winning films with wide international festival and TV exposure include A Gesar Bard's Tale (2013) and Stone Pastures (2008). Donagh's films have also been shown at museums such as MoMA and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and by the European Commission. Besides films and TV-documentaries, Donagh directs radio documentaries for the Finnish and Irish national broadcasters. His Radio Feature Gesar! was Finland’s entry for the 2012 Prix Italia competition, and his feature Do I Exist? was Finland’s entry for the 2015 Prix Europa competition. Donagh is currently pursuing a PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley, continuing the research conducted for his 2022 feature documentary on Tibetan Buddhist tukdam deaths. He is a Dissertation Fellow in the ACLS / Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.