Print detail event | Cape Cod Festival of Arab & Middle Eastern Cinema

Friday, May 3rd at 7pm: GAZA SURF CLUB (2016, documentary, Germany/Palestine, 87 min.) co-sponsored by Sundance Now.

Gaza – a strip of land with a population of 1.7 million citizens, wedged between Israel and Egypt and isolated from the outside world. 26 miles of coastline with a harbor that no longer services ships. Hardly anything gets into Gaza and even less gets out. The young generation is growing up with very little perspective – occupied and jobless. But against this background there is a small movement. Trapped in “the world’s largest open-air prison” and ruled by war, a new generation is drawn to the beaches. Sick of occupation and political gridlock, they find their own personal freedom in the waves of the Mediterranean – they are the surfers of Gaza.

Saturday May 4th at 7:00 pm : THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED (2018, documentary,USA, 86 min.) Post-Screening Skype Q&A with director Assia Boundaoui

In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counter terrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. before 9/11, code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal.”

With unprecedented access, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker’s examination of why her community—including her own family—fell under blanket government surveillance. Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy shrouding what happened and takes the FBI to federal court to compel them to make the records they collected about her community public. In the process, she confronts long-hidden truths about the FBI’s relationship to her community.

THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation, while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family.

Dates & Times

Dates: 2019/05/03 - 2019/05/04

Additional time info:

May 3rd screening is PRECEDED BY the comedy short THE DELIVERY (2018, Jordan/UAE, 22 min.): In a troubled (fictional) Middle Eastern country, the President goes into hiding after receiving numerous threats from a rebel army faction. Mustafa, a delivery man on a tight schedule on the day of his engagement, inadvertently stumbles upon the President’s hiding place – an apartment in a run down corner of the city. He is immediately taken for an assassin, and repeatedly questioned and tortured by the fiercely loyal Captain Amin. Little do both of them know that Mustafa’s appearance is no coincidence at all.

May 4th screening is PRECEDED BY the short FAMILY OF TOO MANY (2018, USA, 14 min.): Bahar, an 8-year-old Iranian girl, believes she has caused the death of her grandmother. As she deals with her feelings of guilt, her parents decide to steal grandmother’s body. As Baha’is living in Shi’a Iran, the family risks everything when they spirit the body away in the middle of the night so that they may perform their prohibited religious rituals. In Iran of 1980s, all but one religion is condemned and this family of religious minority struggle to survive in the new circumstances.

Post-Screening Skype Q&A with director Assia Boundaoui.