Crossing boundaries

Several films in this year’s Boston Palestine Film Festival, co-presented by the Museum of Fine Arts, explore frustrations and heartaches on the road, implicitly or directly. And as with most moviemaking with a message, the subtler treatments of political themes tend to make for more effective films. The festival begins today and runs through Nov. 1

The opening night movie, “Pomegranates and Myrrh,’’ begins with a scene of nerve-wracking tension as a handsome bridegroom and his entourage set off from Ramallah, in the West Bank, to meet his bride at the church, presumably in East Jerusalem. That means getting through an Israeli checkpoint, where cars crawl forward as a sullen Israeli soldier makes them open doors and trunks ever so slowly, stoking tempers close to the boiling point. They finally make it through, but the Christian wedding starts late, and the families’ angst is evident.

Salma Abu Ayyash, a Palestinian-American who lives in Cambridge, said she helped found the film festival three years ago to convey the realities of Palestinian life to a wider audience beyond the academics and activists who attend lectures and seminars.

A freelance translator and longtime campaigner for Palestinian rights, she helped organize an exhibit by cartoonist Naji al-Ali about life in Palestine outside Peet’s Coffee in Harvard Square in 2006, and was surprised when passersby said they hadn’t known much about Palestinian suffering until then. That prompted ideas for an ambitious film festival.

“We thought that film was a medium that speaks with power on a human level to people, without all the political jargon,’’ she said. “Films that deal with love, marriage, and kids, and have the Israeli occupation as a backdrop, can accomplish what many lectures can’t.’’

More than a thousand people attended the festival in its first year, and the number rose by 17 percent last year, Ayyash said. The festival aims even higher this year, with 45 films being screened at the MFA, the Kendall Square Cinema, Harvard University, and Boston College.

The program includes a striking range of films, from dramas to documentaries, that reflect on aspects of Palestinian life. Several touch on the theme of roads, into and through the territories, and across the borders into Arab countries where the diaspora has spread.

The program includes a classic Palestinian road movie called “The Dupes,’’ made in 1972, which tells the story of three Palestinian men who traveled to Iraq in the 1950s hidden in a tanker truck. Adapted from a 1962 novella by Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in a Beirut car bombing in 1972, the film was one of the first by a Palestinian director to explore issues of Palestinian identity.

Ayyash, who was born in Jordan to parents who fled Israel and came to Boston in 1995, said the story was one of the first she read as a child growing up in Amman.

The road theme also permeates “Laila’s Birthday,’’ the festival’s concluding film. It is the tragicomic story of a proud judge who is forced to become a taxi driver. As he ferries passengers around Ramallah, his cab becomes a meeting place and escape hatch for a range of characters of more or less repute.

“Laila’s Birthday’’ gnaws away at the complexities and absurdities of Palestinian life with humor and self-deprecation, never letting politics overwhelm the story. That screening will include a panel discussion.

Filmmaker Najwa Najjar will speak after the screening of her love triangle-themed “Pomegranates and Myrrh.’’ The hero, an olive farmer, is arrested and imprisoned for trying to defend his land and family from an Israeli patrol. His young wife, a traditional dancer and free spirit, is entranced by the choreographer who has arrived in Ramallah to train the troupe.

Israeli soldiers arrive unannounced and declare to the family that the olive grove is being confiscated because some boys threw stones at a patrol from the land. Within days, a band of Israeli settlers camps on the seized olive grove and erects a tented outpost.

While many Israelis argue that disruptive checkpoints and barriers address the threat of Palestinian attackers, Ayyash said this film and others on the program provide a channel for Palestinians to express their interpretations of daily reality.

Israeli filmmakers have sometimes been more self-critical than their Palestinian counterparts, who offer depictions typically defined either by heroism or suffering. Israeli artists’ scrutiny of their nation’s values often comes through in the offerings at the well-established Boston Jewish Film Festival, now in its 21st year, which runs Nov. 4-15.

Yet Ayyash said Israeli films often “suffer from the shoot-and-cry syndrome. For some Palestinians, it’s too little too late.’’ The animated film “Waltz With Bashir,’’ about Israeli soldiers in Lebanon in 1982, drew worldwide acclaim. But Ayyash saw it differently. “What that film accomplished,’’ she said, “is absolving Israel for most of the blame for the [Lebanon] massacre.’’

She does criticize the failure of Palestinian filmmakers to look hard enough at their own society’s failings. “They are always afraid to put their dirty laundry out because they have such a big opposite side to deal with,’’ she said. “People say, ‘Let’s liberate Palestine first, and then we’ll go to gay rights.’ The same with women’s rights. There needs to be more self-criticism, but not in the conflict-balanced way that people want us to do.’’

“Laila’s Birthday,’’ with its wry glimpses of Palestinian foibles, is a good argument for looking inward. The festival also promises documentaries about “honor killings’’ of wives and about the lack of gay rights for Palestinians, as well as several new documentaries about Gaza.

Sure to cause a stir among academics is the documentary “American Radical,’’ about former professor Norman Finkelstein, the New York City-raised son of Polish Holocaust survivors who is among Israel’s most outspoken critics.

The documentaries, Ayyash said, “function almost as feature films in how much they involve you in a story. People sometimes feel documentaries are boring - but the reality is so surreal and unimaginable, that these documentaries end up feeling like works of fiction.’’

James F. Smith writes about Boston’s global ties. He can be reached at jsmith@globe.com. His blog is www.boston.com/worldlyboston.