10th Annual Houston Palestine Film Festival: Trip Along Exodus (at MFAH)

The 10th Annual Houston Palestine Film Festival, takes place over three weekends in May. The annual Houston Palestine Film Festival presents an honest and independent view of Palestine and its diaspora’s society, culture, and politics through the art of film.

For nine years, the Houston Palestine Film Festival has presented audiences with award-winning comedies, dramas, and documentaries from a rich and growing Palestinian cinema movement.

The landmark 10th edition may be the festival’s most ambitious.

From two-time Oscar nominee Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now; Omar) comes The Idol, based on Arab Idol winner and singing sensation Mohammed Assaf;  Amber Fares’ Speed Sisters is a raucously funny documentary about the Arab world’s first all-woman professional auto racing team. Mai Masri presents 3000 Nights, her debut feature-length drama. And from Palestinian provocateurs Arab and Tarzan Nasser comes Dégradé, set in a Gaza hair salon.

HPFF screenings continue at Rice Cinema on May 19-22 and 26-28.

Trip Along Exodus

Directed by Hind Shoufani
2014, in English and Arabic with English subtitles
Lebanon/Syria/Israel/USA/ United Arab Emirates
120 minutes

This feature-length documentary explores the last 70 years of Palestinian politics as seen through the eyes of the filmmaker’s father, author and leftist intellectual Elias Shoufani (1932–2013).

Trip Along Exodus follows his story from 1948 under occupation, to getting a PhD from Princeton in the 1960s, to giving up tenured professorship to join the underground in Beirut. He stayed there until moving to Syria, living in exile in war-torn Damascus.