Cool Film: Houston Palestinian Film Festival + Domy/Film Threat Screenings

For those who like things cinematic (and good, obviously), there’s some really, truly cool stuff coming up. Today (Thursday, April 16th, that is) marks the start of the third-annual Houston Palestinian Film Festival, a showcase of movies by Palestinian filmmakers, and it looks pretty great. Here’s the overall mission statement, if you’re curious:

The second annual Houston Palestine Film Festival brings an honest and independent view of Palestine and its diaspora’s society, culture, and political travails through the art of film. This group of groundbreaking cinematic texts rise above the degrading stereotypes or reductively politicized depictions that are so familiar to Houstonians. A major goal of the Festival is to directly expose our local community to the perspective of artists as a first step toward circumventing the many government and media filters that pollute our understanding of Palestine and the wider region.

The Festival runs across the next two weekends, April 16th-18th and 24th-25th, mostly at the Rice Media Center, and tickets to each night of films run $7 for adults & $6 for kids, students, & seniors, which is pretty much a bargain for the multiple, mostly-short films you get each night. The full schedule’s up here, but everything listed looks interesting (to me, at least). I think my favorite’s Space Exodus, but that’s just because I’m a sci-fi geek.

You can check out a quick glimpse of the festival offerings below:

Damn, almost forgot — while the festival starts tonight, the kickoff isn’t actually a film showing, but a live performance by Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-American actress who’s in fest film Salt of this Sea and is a respected writer and poet who’s a veteran of the HBO Def Poetry Jam. She’ll be at the El Dorado Ballroom (2310 Elgin) from 7-11PM tonight, along with Salt of this Sea director Annemarie Jacir. (The tickets for tonight, btw, are $10, rather than the usual $7…)

Movie Night at Domy: No, I know it’s not exactly new-“new”, since Domy has screened various cool films on a regular basis for a while now, but starting tonight they’re teaming up with the brainy movie buffs behind Film Monitor, an awesome little (and yeah, I do mean “little”) H-town zine that thinks waaaay more about serious film than I do, to spotlight a bunch of classic films, one every Thursday through I-dunno-when.

Check here for the schedule — thankyew, Free Press folks — and get your ass on up to Domy some Thursday night. Movies start at 8:30PM, they’re free, and the inaugural film in the series is Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast; what the hell else could you want?