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...
Old Documents Shed New Light on History in Book Connected to Ancient Islamic World
The painstaking work to recover history—one page at a time—is on brilliant display in this collection of essays focusing on early Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Sogdian manuscripts.
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When George Reisner died in 1942, he did so surrounded by ghosts—not just the pharaohs he’d unearthed but the stacks of unpublished notes that entombed his legacy.