John Menick

In the fall of 2002, Emily Jacir asked me to help her organize a video festival in Palestine. As I remember, Emily had sent out an email to a group of artist friends requesting they send videos to show in a class she was teaching at Birzeit University that winter. Evidently, she meant the request to be private, but that wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the email, and many of the people began forwarding it on. The emails spread quickly, and weeks later she was inundated with videos.

I watched and helped select many of the videos with Emily, at first just because I was around, and then as a co-organizer. A video festival grew out of those initial subissions. Actually, Emily did most of the hard work in Palestine, and I mostly managed the New York end. The response to the project was quite good, and despite the fact that there was almost no press on the fest outside of Palestine, I get occasional emails about the project. There have been several film and video festivals since, but none focusing on videos art or experimental cinema.

The old domain for the festival’s Web site expired (impossible to renew since it was gobbled up by some porn company) and the only records of the festival left were the local PHP files I had backed up in an ancient computer in my apartment. At Emily’s request I dug them out and will keep them archived here until we find a better place for them.