FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE!
U-Mich Community RSVP -
YXNla3VsZXIgfCB1bWljaCAhIGVkdQ==
Filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana leaves her childhood home in Fureidis, an Arab village near Haifa, to build a life in Tel Aviv. Early on she meets Jonathan, a Jewish immigrant from Montreal, and their romance becomes the heart of the story. What begins as a tender cross-cultural love affair quickly collides with larger realities, unfolding against the backdrop of the 2009 Gaza war. Quiet dinners at home shift into anti-war activism, tense family encounters, and a fraught visit to Jonathan’s grandfather’s kibbutz, where personal memory sparks political confrontation.
More than a decade later, 77 Steps resonates with striking immediacy. As the current crisis in Gaza once again underscores the deep fractures of Israeli and Palestinian life, Mara’ana’s intimate journey becomes a powerful reminder of the fragile, complicated spaces where love, identity, and politics converge. What begins as a nostalgic pilgrimage unfolds into a profound journey—one that pulls each of them into the tangled legacies of memory and identity, of dreams and disillusionment.
Screening as part of AT THE EDGE OF HOPE, a film series that brings together urgent, intimate, and deeply human films from Israel, Palestine, and beyond.Through stories that are both intimate and political, the films trace how personal lives are upended by war, how families and communities wrestle with grief and division, and how questions of identity and belonging are refracted through borders, histories, and everyday encounters.
They bear witness to the profound fractures that shape Israeli and Palestinian life, while also revealing the ways those fractures echo globally, in the halls of government, on university campuses, and in the rhythms of daily existence. Even amid devastation, the works gesture toward fragile possibilities: glimpses of connection, resilience, and the stubborn persistence of hope. More than chronicles of conflict, these films demand that we sit with complexity, listen across divides, and ask what it means to imagine a different future in a time of war.
Presented by University of Michigan Dearborn's Journalism and Media Production Program.
Supported by the Ravitz Family Foundation, UofM Arts Initiative, Cinema Detroit, Center for Arab American Studies
Also check out other Entertainment events in Wayne, Arts events in Wayne.
|
