Discoveries from Palestinian Territories World Cinema

Daily life of Palestinians of Gaza during the year of 2005.

A documentary exploring the phenomenon of child labour in Gaza. The film tells the moving stories of four children, looking into the economic, social and political conditions that led them into the workforce at a young age, and examining the impact and implications for their families, the society and their future.

Saif Hammash uses archival sound as a lead to the moving images in his film, creating a narrative about livelihood, destruction, and survival. With the rhythm of the sounds, we go from a state of normalcy to a state of chaos and then resistance. - Mahasen Nasser-Eldin for BlackStar

A tough journey with a Bedouin group across the Sinai Peninsula, far from habitation. Everything seems to take place outside political and historical frameworks.

Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolish a house that has been lived in and cherished for many years, and rip out the roots of an olive tree that was planted in anticipation of a child's birth. As the family watches the video footage, we see a deep sense of powerlessness and despair etched in their faces.

A fascinating account of the beliefs and motives of notorious hijacker Leila Khaled. The charismatic freedom fighter talks candidly about her methods and the facts behind the simultaneous hijacking of three airliners in September 1971.

I am Ghazza was shot right after the 2008-2009 attack on Gaza. This attack left 1300 killed and 6000 injured. The film addresses the social and psychological impacts of war on the people of Gaza through the testimony of Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychotherapist. Dr. Eyad discusses the short and long term impact of war on the people, especially the children. This film shares some of the individual stories that were not covered by the mainstream media. Asma Beseiso, a 25-year-old Jordanian filmmaker, could not believe what she saw on the news. Media coverage only told a small part of the story of what was happening in Gaza. Beseiso left Amman in February 2009 and headed to her parents’ hometown in Gaza a month after the Israeli bombardment.

A documentary which chronicles the lives of an elder Palestinian generation who decided to stay in their homes in Haifa after 1948. The film's subjects are aged women and men who are over seventy, still living in Haifa, narrating their personal experience through the 1948 Nakba, when their families were exiled from their homeland.

A mixed media animation film about people, human resistance, and the will to exist. It's about a city that keeps maintaining itself, like the phoenix that cyclically regenerates and obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor. A city that keeps growing despite the fact of war, searching for hope to exist and for a better future.

In this short documentary, the Forensic Architecture research group reconstructs the death of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. While reporting on an Israeli military raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank in May 2022, she and her colleagues came under fire, allegedly from a military convoy 200 meters away.

After the assassination of Shireen Abu-Akleh, I return from the UK to Palestine and open my archive of May 2021 upraising in Haifa. On this trip, I relive memories and places I left, but it did not leave me, and ask questions about being a journalist during dangerous events.

Story line based in Palestine, interviews with residents, ex war veterans and victims of the Palestinian war. Documentary about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

HOURIA weaves together the stories of Hattab and his grandmother Yousra to reflect on fluid modes of belonging. Yousra was expelled from her village Jamaseen Al-Garbi by Zionist paramilitary groups in 1948, and she remains witness to the decline of Jaffa’s glory where she resettled after the Nakba. On the other hand, Hattab, presented as a hybrid mermaid and a symbol of the shores of Manshiyyeh (North of Tel Aviv), embodies both the liminality of those who were driven out of Palestine and the longing desire to belong to the Palestinian nation.

The story of Palestinian families from the village of Tiret Haifa (now Tiret al Karmel) who fled or were driven out of their land in 1948 and have since been scattered among the West Bank, Syria and Jordan.

In THIS PALESTINIAN LIFE, director Philip Rizk uses an oral history approach to highlight the stories and perspectives of Palestinian villagers and Bedouin. This method avoids using "experts" to interpret the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Rather, the film's anthropological and ethnographic method portrays the daily life of Palestinian communities, in order to explore in greater depth how Palestinian life is being undermined by the pressure of Israeli occupation. Especially in Gaza, this style reveals the profound fragmentation of community life. The following stories are threaded together and interlaced to reveal the similarity of Israeli measures of occupation throughout Gaza and the West Bank, and the similarity of Palestinian reactions through sumoud – perseverance – to remain on the land.

Through the daily life of Jerusalemite social worker Riham, we discover the difficult situation and suffering experienced by four families because of the political, economic and social circumstances in the Old City. Riham faces her own Personal difficulties in her wish to marry Omar. His family opposes the marriage fearing for their own reputation, do to the habits of her brother.

While reflecting on the present, a young Palestinian recalls childhood memories of the military invasion and siege of Bethlehem. By trying to understand how his parents led him though those difficult times, he hopes to find the strength and support he needs to cope with the present.

This deceptively quiet film presents a portrait of Aljafaris family in Ramleh and Jaffa that hovers between documentary and cinematic memoir, guided by a nimble camera moving calmly but ceaselessly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined. The title refers to the roof missing from the house where Aljafaris family resettled in 1948, a home unfinished, an incomplete construction project. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafaris striking use of his cast, his family, reveals the influence of Bressons use of nonprofessional actors as models whose performances emanate from their presence, not from acting.

Short film about the making of images.