Visiting Filmmakers Series at Mason: Naila and the Uprising with Julia Bacha

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EST
Johnson Center, Cinema

Naila and the Uprising

Tuesday Nov 12 4:30pm

Johnson Center Cinema 

Documentary screening and discussion with director Julia Bacha  

 

When a nation-wide uprising breaks out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a young woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family, and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a movement that forces the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination for the first time.

Naila and the Uprising -- a JustVision Film -- chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh and a fierce community of women at the frontlines, whose stories weave through the most vibrant, nonviolent mobilization in Palestinian history, the First Intifada in the late 1980s.

Using animation, intimate interviews, and exclusive archival footage, this film makes visible the courageous women activists who have remained on the margins of history. While most images of the First Intifada paint an incomplete picture of stone-throwing young men front and center, this film tells the story that history overlooked -- of an unbending, nonviolent women’s movement at the head of Palestine’s struggle for freedom.

While the First Intifada provides the backdrop for Naila and the Uprising, its lessons transcend that particular time and place. Through the experience of countless women engaged at all levels of society, we learn what is possible when women take the lead in struggles for rights and justice -- from a movement’s inception to peace talks -- and what we lose when they are stripped of their roles.

We also witness the tremendous power of nonviolent organizing: women’s committees, drawing on all the hallmarks of civil resistance, were able to mobilize hundreds of thousands through massive street rallies, mobile health clinics, underground schools and concerted boycott campaigns, sustaining the uprising while generating indigenous self-sufficiency. In Naila and the Uprising we see how women-led civil resistance can stir the masses, put pressure on power-holders, and affect real structural change.

Our screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Julia Bacha and Amal Amireh, Associate Professor of English and Middle East Studies at Mason

Our event is sponsored by Film and Video Studies, Film and Media Studies, Middle East and Islamic Studies, Ali Vural Ak Center, Global Affairs and Global Programs, Cultural StudiesDKA at GMU, English Department, the Interdisciplinary Curriculum Committee, University Life, and Women and Gender Studies.

Naila and the Uprising with Julia Bacha is part of a series of events, partnered with the Fall 2019 Cultural Studies Colloquium. 

See:

CSC: Nov 7: "Palestine in Black and White" with Greg Burris, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, American University of Beirut

 

 

and 

 

CSC: Nov 21: "Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel"
w/ Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University

For more information:

Cynthia Fuchs cfuchs@gmu.edu

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