Goal Dreams
Sanbar, Maya and Jeffrey Saunders, dirs
2006, Israel/Palestine/Egypt, 84’. English and Arabic. Arab Film Distribution (www.arabfilm.com), $24.99 home / $300 institutional
The Israeli occupation is shown as experienced by the Palestinian national soccer team. Gathered from the Palestinian diaspora, players from Chile, Kuwait, Lebanon, Sweden and the US meet in Egypt to train for a World Cup qualifying match while their teammates from Gaza are delayed indefinitely at the border. The documentary illustrates the effects of the occupation on sport: players unable to train or compete on their home turf, violent deaths of friends in Palestine, and the challenges of creating a unified team from players with vast cultural differences.
You may also be interested in...
Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem—Book Review
In this painstaking work, Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem, historians Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler explore a culture in which books became woven into the fabric of daily life through the case of Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāsīrī.
The Legacy of Egyptologist George Reisner—Our Book Review
When George Reisner died in 1942, he did so surrounded by ghosts—not just the pharaohs he’d unearthed but the stacks of unpublished notes that entombed his legacy.