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Steven Spielberg's Latest Project: Encounters of the Arab-Jewish Coexistence Kind
It turns out, rather surprisingly, that only recently have Arab residents of Jerusalem and other local Arabic speakers been able to enjoy movies with Arabic subtitles at the city’s Cinematheque. This is thanks to American Jewish film director and producer Steven Spielberg and the foundation he established with the profits from “Schindler’s List,” and subsequently his other Oscar-winning films including “Munich” and “Lincoln.”
One of the main goals of the Righteous Persons Foundation, established in 1994, is to promote contact and understanding between Jews and non-Jews, mostly through the use of media, in order to humanize the “other.”
The RPF recently donated $50,000 to the Jerusalem Cinematheque as part of a new project called “Cinema for Everyone,” whose aim is, according to the foundation’s website, “to subtitle films in Arabic as a way to ensure that Israeli Arabs have access to cinema, and to bring Jews and Arabs together around film” at the veteran institution.
The Cinematheque is using the funding to screen four or five films a month – both Israeli- and foreign-made – to which Arabic subtitles have been added. The Cinematheque hired an advertising and public relations firm in East Jerusalem to publicize the new project in that predominantly Arab part of the city.
To that end, signs were put up in November and December in East Jerusalem, posters were plastered on buses, a special Facebook page was set up, and ads appeared in media where the Arab-speaking community would see them to inform residents of the screenings of the Arabic-subtitled films.
The response, however, was not great. A series of shootings and hit-and-run terror attacks during those months changed the atmosphere in the city, and tensions between Arabs and Jews rose to especially high levels.
“Culture and economics usually succeed in building bridges between the western and eastern sides of the city, and between the country in general and East Jerusalem,” said Hatem Hawis of the Al-Arabiya advertising agency in East Jerusalem, which managed the ad campaign for “Cinema for Everyone.”
“We knew in advance the response would be low, but we still set our goal to provide the residents of East Jerusalem with the possibility of having a choice,” says Haneen Mgadlh, East Jerusalem project coordinator of the Jerusalem Foundation, which also participates in this effort. To convince people from the eastern part of the city to come to the western part for cultural purposes is a real challenge, she added.
Source: www.haaretz.com