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Mustafa Abu Ali

Biography from TheMovieDB

Mustafa Abu Ali ( مصطفى أبو علي) was a Palestinian filmmaker. Abu Ali studied at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1960s before studying cinema in London, graduating in 1967. He is considered one of the founders of Palestinian cinema, and the Palestinian Cinema Association in Beirut in 1973, (re-established in Ramallah in 2004). Along with Sulafa Jadallah and Hani Jowharieh, he established the Palestine Film Unit (PFU)--which saw its primary task as "documenting the revolution and creating an archive of images of historical documents". After the PLO's move to Lebanon after the events of Black September, the PFU was renamed the Palestine Cinema Institute and became one of the seven departments of the PLO's Unified Media. Abu Ali headed the department from 1973 to 1975. Abu Ali wrote four screenplays and directed more than 30 films, for which he won more than 14 awards, the most recent from the 2003 Ismailia Film Festival.

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Assistant Director:
1976  Here and Elsewhere

Director:
1968  No to the Peaceful Solution
1971  With Blood and Soul
1973  A Zionist Aggression
1973  Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza
1974  They Do Not Exist
1976  Here and Elsewhere
1977  Palestine in the Eye
1977  Tall el Zaatar

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While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

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  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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