Moving beyond the news stories

For the past year, a group of nearly a dozen teachers, research scientists, and film festival curators has been working to organize the first Boston Palestine Film Festival. Larger Palestinian festivals in London and Chicago and Houston were contacted to track down movie distributors, fund-raisers were held, local venues were lined up.

The festival opens Saturday and it's ambitious out of the gate: nine days long with 29 featured works, three programs of shorts, 14 visiting directors, screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Harvard University Law School, and Boston College, and parties at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Casablanca restaurant.

A spiffy website at bostonpalestinefilmfest.org lays out detailed information about the movies, directors, and festival mission to "bring an honest, self-described, and independent view of Palestine and its diasporic society, culture, and political travails."

"I can't help but talk about politics when I talk about Palestine, but for us the festival is not a political endeavor," says Salma Abu Ayyash, one of the curators and organizers. "Of course we want to promote Palestinian voices, because it's a struggle and a very unjust situation for Palestinian people, but we're trying to promote this as art. These films are all worth watching - you don't have to be politically oriented to enjoy them."

"Driving To Zigzigland," for instance, about a Palestinian cab driver in Los Angeles, is one of the lighter movies scheduled. It's "funny, cute, entertaining," Ayyash says. It plays on Oct. 6 at 5 p.m. at Kendall Square, with director Nicole Ballivian present for its US premiere.

The opening-night documentary, "Leila Khaled: Hijacker," tracks down the woman who took over airplanes in 1969 and 1970 as a self-styled "Che Guevara commando unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Director Lina Makboul was born in Sweden to Palestinian parents years after the hijackings and grew up thinking of Khaled as a romantic hero (no passengers were killed in either of Khaled's actions). Later in life she reconsidered. Makboul will be at the MFA for the 7:15 p.m. show on Saturday.

A two-hour program of shorts by Palestinian children who are living in refugee camps on the West Bank features mini-movies developed in partnership with a Boston-area group called Voices Beyond Walls. Voices was started by members of Tawassul, a Cambridge-based group co-founded by Ayyash in the mid-1990s to create a forum for Palestinian art.

"Volunteers go to Palestine who first get trained here to learn rudimentary filmmaking - how do you handle the camera, what's a good script, etc.," says Ayyash, an electrical engineer who teaches chemistry and biology at Brighton High School. "We spend a week per camp and teach kids how to think of a story, how to storyboard it, script it, and then shoot it, and then we use a simple software to teach them how to edit films." The shorts will play on Oct. 1 at 7 p.m. at Harvard Law School, in the Langdell South building.

Directors with local connections are on the program, too: Diana Keown Allan's "Still Life," about the life of one Palestinian who left in 1948, and Ayelet Bechar's "Just Married," about an Israeli law that prevents residents of the Palestinian territories from entering Israel even if they're married to an Israeli, both play the Coolidge Corner at noon next Sunday. Allan and Bechar will be at the show.

"We went for the Coolidge [as a venue] specifically to invite the Jewish neighborhood," says Ayyash, who was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents. "We want to invite people to communicate, talk, have a discussion. Or just to see some of these films. A lot of people don't have that opportunity to see the other side."

CONVERSATIONS WITH: Portuguese film director Pedro Costa will be at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday and Saturday as part of a three-day program providing a complete retrospective of his films. His most recent feature film, "Colossal Youth," about a Cape Verdean laborer looking for connections after his wife leaves him, played the HFA last January as part of the New Films From Europe Festival.

"Few movies are as concretely rooted in physical reality or as profoundly attentive to their social context as Mr. Costa's," wrote Dennis Lim in The New York Times last July. "In recent years he has shot almost exclusively in the slums of Lisbon, working closely with the downtrodden inhabitants. Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of Arte Povera, a monumental cinema of humble means."

"Colossal Youth" plays next Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Costa will appear with his earlier works on Friday and Saturday nights. Call 617-495-4700 or visit hcl.harvard.edu/hfa for full details.

CORN, FISH, SEAHORSES: The Coolidge is hosting a three-day program called "Muddy River: Boston's Environmental Film Series" today through Tuesday. It launches at noon with "King Corn," which documents the experiment of Boston's Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney to move to Iowa and grow one acre of corn. Their goal: Get some of those good ole government subsidies - and look at the grain's role in the US food system. Cheney will be on hand for a Q&A, and ticket holders are welcome to an opening reception at 2 p.m. featuring foods that were locally produced.

The festival includes Courtney Hayes and Tim Gallagher's "A Fish Story," about Gloucester fishing families and ocean-management laws. That plays Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. and will be followed by a Q&A with Madeleine Hall-Arber of MIT's Center for Marine Social Sciences. At 8 p.m. on Tuesday, the band Yo La Tengo will perform live to the films of French filmmaker Jean Painlev in a program introduced by Fabian Cousteau, a filmmaker and grandson of Jacques Cousteau. The Coolidge notes that "Painlev explored a twilight realm of vampire bats, seahorses, octopi, and liquid crystals." Details are at coolidge.org/muddyriver, or call 617-734-2500. SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The Newburyport Documentary Film Festival runs Friday through Sunday at venues throughout the coastal town. "The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus" opens the program, with a QA with director Edward J. Delaney, a faculty member at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island (northernlightsfilmfestival.com) . . . The 10th Annual Manhattan Short Film Festival will be presented next weekend at venues around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday at 5 p.m. The twist is that everybody everywhere gets to vote on his or her favorite films, with the votes tabulated at the festival's New York office Saturday night and announced the next day. The list of shorts in competition is online at msfilmfest.com. Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com.