Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution
Director: Ismael Shammout
The Urgent Call of Palestine Restored documentary short 1973
5 minutes In English with Arabic subtitles A beautiful short with singer Zeinab Shaath singing the poem The Urgent Call of Palestine by Lalita Banjabi.
This film, shot in the countryside with only a camera and a guitar, has such a heartbreaking visceral quality... it is poetic but also tragic, especially in light of seeing it today and understanding that the situation of the Palestinians has only gotten worse since it was made. This was a cinéma vérité production of the Cultural Arts Section of the PLO. In my eyes this is a real gem. |
Director: PLO Film Unit/Mustafa Abu Ali
Palestine in the EyeRestored documentary short 1976
28 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles Palestine in the Eye offers a rare glimpse into the PLO's Media Unit during the seventies, which marked a significant era of the Palestinian Revolution.
Mustafa Abu Ali features the association's main cinematographer Hani Jawrahieh and the impact that his death had on resistance fighters that he frequently traveled with while filming the battlefields. Through interviews with those who knew him, it becomes clear that despite spending more time amongst militia groups than many of the combatants did, Jawhariyeh never held gun. A trail of his restored images resurfaces, and while hardly any of Hani can be found, the Unit's ideology remains preserved within the moment that he is killed. |
Director: Ismael Shammout
Glow of MemoriesVideo art/restored documentary short 1972
11 minutes Centring around an old Palestinian man who is
the subject of Shammout’s painting Memories and Fire, the film acts to unravel his memories using archival photographs and Shammout’s own paintings to tell the story of Palestinian dispossession and resistance to it. By simply using a montage of visuals and sounds and avoiding narration, Shammout adopts a style that enables the film to communicate across language boundaries, creating a film that offered a nonverbal, affective narrative of the Palestinian cause. |
Director: Azza el Hassan
Kings and ExtrasDocumentary 2004
62 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles Kings and Extras takes us back on cinematographer Hani El Jawhariyeh's journey with the PLO's Media Unit in the aftermath of his death, this time through director Azza El Hassan's investigation of the lost film archives.
On a road trip across several Middle Eastern countries, she asks those who knew Hani to assist her in relocating the vanished footage that recorded 25 years of Palestinian history- from 1967 until 1982. She interviews his daughter Hiba, who is Azza's childhood friend through her own father's involvement with the PLO. As many questions are left unanswered, the spectators draw their own conclusions as to what happened in Beirut in 1982 when the Unit's footage was lost. Myths build their own narratives, torn between the nemesis and feeling betrayed by those who didn't manage to preserve their legacy. |
Director: Annemarie Jacir
Salt of This seaFeature drama 2009
109 minutes In Arabic and English with English subtitles Soraya, born in Brooklyn in a working class community of Palestinian refugees, discovers that her grandfather’s savings were frozen in a bank account in Jaffa when he was exiled in 1948.
Stubborn, passionate and determined to reclaim what is hers, she fulfills her life-long dream of “returning” to Palestine. Slowly she is taken apart by the reality around her and is forced to confront her own internal anger. She meets Emad, a young Palestinian whose ambition, contrary to hers, is to leave forever. Tired of the constraints that dictate their lives, they know in order to be free, they must take things into their own hands, even if it’s illegal. |
Director: Larissa Sansour
In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain
Fictional video essay 2016
29 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain - suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention - de facto creating a nation. The film takes the form of a fictional video essay. A voice-over based on an interview between a psychiatrist and the female leader of the narrative resistance group reveals the philosophy and ideas behind the group's actions. The leader's thoughts on myth and fiction as constitutive for fact, history and documentary translate into poetic and science fiction-based visuals. As the film progresses, the narrative and visuals alternate between the theoretical and the personal. The resistance leader's deceased twin sister makes a crucial appearance as the story takes the viewer deeper and deeper into the resistance leader's subconscious. |
Director: Lina Al Abed
Ibrahim: A Fate to DefineDocumentary 2019
75 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles IBRAHIM: A Fate to Define is a personal documentary, following the director’s quest to define her identity by tracing the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of her father, Ibrahim.
In this provocative and personal documentary, director Lina Al Abed searches for traces of her disappeared father: a seemingly ordinary Palestinian family man who was actually a secret member of a militant splinter faction and vanished when she was just a child. |
Director: Mohanad Yaqubi
Off Frame aka Revolution until Victory
Historical documentary 2015
62 minutes In Arabic, English and Italian with English subtitles Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory is a meditation on the Palestinian people's struggle to produce an image and self-representation on their own terms in the 1960s and 1970s, with the establishment of the Palestine Film Unit as part of the PLO.
Unearthing films stored in archives across the world after an unprecedented research and access, the film begins with popular representations of modern Palestine and traces the works of militant filmmakers in reclaiming image and narrative through revolutionary and militant cinema. In resurrecting a forgotten memory of struggle, Off Frame reanimates what is within the frame, but also weaves a critical reflection by looking for what is outside it, or what is off frame. |
Director: Mahasen Nasser Eldin
The Silent Protest: Jerusalem 1929
Documentary short 2019
20 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles On 26 October 1929, Palestinian women launched their women’s movement. Approximately 300 women converged on Jerusalem from all over Palestine. They held a silent demonstration through a car convoy to protest at the British High Commissioner’s bias against Arabs in the Buraq uprising. This is their story on that day.
Jerusalem-born filmmaker Mahasen Nasser-Eldin specializes in reconstructing and scripting historical narratives using audio and visual archives to restore new life to forgotten figures and celebrate those on the margins of society. |
Director: Jumana Manna
A Magical Substance Flows into MeDocumentary 2015
63 minutes In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles This movie feels like a fresh breeze blowing in from the south. Director Jumana Manna travels in areas around contemporary Jerusalem on a musical journey. She was inspired by old recordings by German-Jewish musicologist Robert Lachmann, who traveled around in the 1930s, making field recordings of the area. He felt even way back then that a lot of music was losing its essence because musicians were trying to become more modern and he wanted to document it. Jumana Manna continues the travel, not to separate and distinguish the various threads of music, but to weave them together and present them as a flowing stream.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist in her own right, and her creative background clearly influenced her choices of how to structure this documentary. The cinematography is crystalline, absolutely gorgeous, with the quality of paintings. |
Director: Larissa Sansour
A Space Exodus
Sci-fi short 2009
5 minutes In English A Space Exodus quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognisable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour's film.
The film follows the artist herself onto a phantasmagoric journey through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick's thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing Armstrong's moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as "a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind". The film offers a naively hopeful and optimistic vision for a Palestinian future contrasting sharply with all the elements that are currently eating away at the very idea of a viable Palestinian state. In A Space Exodus, Sansour does finally reach the moon, although her contact with Palestine's capital is cut off. This five-minute short is packed with highly produced visual imagery. The arabesque elements ranging from the space suit to the music are merged within a dreamy galactic setting and elaborate special effects. A great deal of attention is paid to every detail of the film to create a never before seen case of thrillingly magical Palestinian displacement. |
Director: Larissa Sansour
Nation Estate
Sci-fi short 2012
10 minutes In English The Nation Estate project consists of a 9-minute sci-fi short film and a photo series offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East.
With its glossy mixture of computer generated imagery, live actors and an arabesque electronica soundtrack, the Nation Estate film explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population - now finally living the high life. |
Director: Razan AlSalah
Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the NakbaDigital short 2017
7 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles This doc-fiction is a (re)construction, a (re)collection of the memory of returning to Haifa. It is an imaginary memory of retuning to Haifa. Razan AlSalah is imagining her grandmother was able to return to Haifa when she was still alive, through Google Streetview, which today is the only way she could see Palestine, the only way Razan can see Palestine.
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Director: Sami Zarrour
The Pipe
Narrative short 2018
10 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles Haunting isolation and the need for a connection blur the lines of reality, and leave him in between two states. But as he loses control, his identity gets clearer and his prison turns out to be of his own making.
The Pipe explores the concept of imprisonment, and what it really means to take away someone’s freedom. It’s an experience of solitary prison that goes beyond the walls of a cell, for a prisoner is not always the one confined by walls. |
Director: Mahdi Fleifel
A Drowning Man
Short fiction 2017
15 minutes In Arabic and Greek with English subtitles Alone and far from home, The Kid makes his way through a strange city looking for the means to get through the day. Surrounded by predators he is forced to make compromises merely to survive, his life of exile grows one day longer
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Director: Nahed Awwad
Gaza Calling
Documentary 2012
64 minutes In Arabic with English subtitles Samer lives in Ramallah in the West Bank. His family lives in Gaza, one hour away. They have not seen each other for six years.
When Mustafa went for a visit to Gaza in 2006, he was 18 years old. He was never allowed to return – his mother Hekmat has been fighting to see him again for seven years. Two families torn apart. They share the same “crime”: being registered with a Gaza address in their Identity Cards. Under Israeli rule, they are considered “infiltrators” in their own country. Their lives have turned into a permanent struggle. Parents can only talk to their sons on the phone; sisters can only see their brothers on the internet – mothers and their children fighting to be together at last… |
Director: Mai Masri
3000 Nights
Feature drama 2015
103 mins In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles Inspired by a true story and shot in a real prison, 3000 Nights traces a young mother’s journey of hope, resilience and survival against all odds.
Accused of helping a teenage boy on the run, newlywed Palestinian schoolteacher, Layal finds herself incarcerated in a top security Israeli prison for Palestinian and Israeli women. After Layal discovers that she is pregnant, the prison director pressures her to abort the baby and spy on the Palestinian inmates. Terrified but defiant, Layal gives birth to her child in chains. Through her struggle to raise her son behind bars, Layal manages to find a sense of hope and meaning to her life. When prison conditions deteriorate and the Palestinian prisoners decide to strike, the prison director warns her against joining the strike and threatens to take her child away. In a moment of truth, Layal is forced to make a choice that will forever change her life. |
Director: Layali Bader
The Reports on Sarah and SaleemDrama/mystery 2018
127 minutes In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles This captivating thriller centers around a Palestinian delivery man from the West Bank who gets embroiled in an affair with an Israeli cafe owner in Jerusalem.
In a city marked by ethnic segregation, racial conflict and class division, Saleem quickly discovers that an extra-marital fling with the Israeli general's wife holds dangerous consequences that he was unprepared to encounter. Faced with Sarah's privilege, and marked by a bureaucratic system of espionage, Saleem's infidelity gets transformed into a political scandal laced with lies and deceit designed to frame him with crimes that he did not commit. In a land where cultural dissonance determines an ordinary Palestinian's fate, Saleem and his pregnant wife channel their own voices in a society that threatens to tear their future apart. |