Flying Paper

Synopsis

The film follows Musa, a teenaged kite-maker in the village of Seifa, and Abeer a young journalist in the Jabalya refugee camp. They join thousands of other children to shatter the Guinness World Record for most kites ever flown.


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Directors

Nitin Sawhney is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the New School for Public Engagement. His research, teaching and creative practice engages the critical role of technology, artistic interventions and DIY cultures among communities in contested spaces. Nitin previously taught at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) and conducted research at the MIT Media Lab. Since 1995, Nitin has worked on several video shorts and interactive media projects, including HyperCafe, an experimental work, which won the Douglas Engelbart prize and was showcased at the MILIA Interactive conference in Cannes, France. Since 2006, Nitin co-founded a nonprofit initiative Voices Beyond Walls to conduct digital video and storytelling workshops with children and youth in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. During a 5 year period, the program was conducted in over 10 refugee camps with nearly 70 video shorts produced. Nitin also co-founded the Boston Palestine Film Festival to showcase Palestinian Cinema to mainstream American audiences and support emerging Palestinian filmmakers. Flying Paper is his first feature-length documentary film.

Roger Hill graduated from Ohio University with a degree in Film, Sociology and African American Studies. While a student Hill completed his first short feature length documentary, Witness a Peace Movement: a Documentary from the Streets of the U.S. Anti-War Movement. Shortly after relocating to the Bay Area he founded MentalRev Productions. Roger has since directed, filmed and edited a compilation of 12 short documentaries, music videos and a narrative-documentary hybrid on issues such as: Homophobia and the ballot box, Police violence during protest actions, the historic March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., Love Stories from people experiencing homelessness, Military Recruitment Lies, the experience of Lebanese Civilians during the 2006 'July War,' and more. The Anthology DVD of Mental-Rev short films was completed in 2009. In 2012 Hill completed the documentary film Struggle concerning U.S. election fraud, and the racist allocation of voting resources. Struggle aired over 20 times on Link TV in the run up to the 2012 Presidential Election. Hill has co-produced a segment for the program Democracy Now, and contributed video to works by artists such as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and rapper Pharoahe Monch, in addition to several independent documentary projects. His work has been seen in the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Minneapolis Film Festival, the traveling Take Back Democracy Film Festival, The Arab Film Festival in San Francisco, the Standing Rock Film Festival, received honorable mention at the Twin Rivers Media Festival, and more. Hill has toured with his films in cities across the United States and worked as a trainer with the Voices Beyond Walls participatory media program in Gaza during the summer of 2010.