Discoveries from Palestinian Territories World Cinema

A simple car trip is beset by politically charged tension and a militarized reality.

A stand-up comedian in Gaza borrows from the daily struggles of survival to bring solace to a wounded audience in a refugee camp.

An important documentary based on a speech by Comrade George Habash, the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on the first anniversary of the Martyrdom of Comrade Ghassan Kanafani. Through this speech the film shows the political position of the Front and the position of the masses towards the question of proposed settlement, as well as the role of the masses in pursuing the armed struggle against the imperialist-Zionist-reactionary enemy.

In 1970, Christian Ghazi and Noureddine Chatti met with a number of Arab political figures, especially Palestinians residing in Lebanon, resulting in this piece of armed (alternative or third) cinema that captures a crucial cross-section of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon in 1970. The film features footage of Ghassan Kanafani, Sadiq Jalal El-Azm, Nabil Shaath and other personalities who share their vision of the Palestinian revolution, tracing its history back to the early 20th century. These testimonies describe the numerous strikes and popular protests that took place in Palestine under the Ottoman occupation, followed by the British colonization and the settlement of the Jewish state in 1948. They enumerate the objectives of the struggle, emphasising the necessity for a free and democratic Palestine, defended through armed or non-armed struggle by all its citizens, men and women of various affiliations.

A personal project with a communal impact, this film aims at transforming individual memories of suffering into a collective memory. It portrays both satirical and realistic scenes from public spaces in Gaza City. The project addresses a range of social issues that have persisted and recurred over the past 15 years, becoming an inseparable part of the city’s fabric and the lives of its residents. It also explores the conceptual landscape of Gaza through the digitization and 3D modeling of these spaces – structures that continue to expand as the blockade endures. This is an attempt to envision how the current natural space might appear.

The Speed Sisters are the first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East. Grabbing headlines and turning heads at improvised tracks across the West Bank, these five women have sped their way into the heart of the gritty, male-dominated Palestinian street car-racing scene. Weaving together their lives on and off the track, SPEED SISTERS takes you on a surprising journey into the drive to go further and faster than anyone thought you could.

A long dark night at the Gaza Sea. The sounds of bomb, ambulances, and cries for help. The film captures the physical and metaphorical darkness enshrouding Gaza.

Sound engineer Mohamed Yaghi works tirelessly to record sounds in the Gaza Strip, leading an auditory journey through four stories, each character reflecting the war's impact since October 7th. Through their voices and experiences, we witness how the sounds of this devastated region have been transformed. A fascinating and original perspective on how humanity endures horror and maintains hope against the odds.

On the night before her heart operation in the hospital, a grandmother from Aleppo opens the doors of memory for her Palestinian granddaughter to share the details of her life in Aleppo, Jaffa and Hebron. The grandmother's memories become a spell of love that wraps around the granddaughter's heart.

Images of the training camps of Al-Assifa, the military wing of the Fatah movement in Jordan. The Israeli army organized raids against the city of As-Salt, located northwest of Amman, on August 4, 1968. Members of the Palestinian brigade, interviewed in English and German, talk about their guerrilla actions, which sometimes involved soldiers of the Jordanian army.

Oum, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown of Haifa, where she explores the urban landscape the only way she can: as a digital ghost via Google Streetview.

Originally presented as an installation, this raw, haunting short by Basma al-Sharif depicts a horse ride at dusk on a farm in Gaza through enveloping sights and sounds — serene and devastating at once.

Two young boys run away from their mother’s protection and slack line on the danger of war to play music with the instrument they always dreamt to have.

The Time that Separates Us circles an ancient salt-rock formation overlooking the Dead Sea, near Ghor Al-Safi, Jordan. In the process, this Pillar of Salt becomes a portal through which to face the Jordan River Valley, its heavily militarized border and complex infrastructures of tourism, as well as the stigmatized realms of desire, sexuality, and gender encoded within a highly mediated political landscape and its related sites of mythology.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied its capital, Beirut. The film is a rare example of a PLO film made after the PLO’s departure from Beirut. It documents the burned and destroyed cultural and educational centers from which Israelis stole films, photographs, and historical and contemporary manuscripts. It includes interviews with key members of the Palestinian cultural scene such as Mahmoud Darwish and Ismail Shammout and those in charge of cultural and educational centers that were destroyed.

In the spring of 2022, an international tourist group will make a day trip to Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank to visit religious sites. But something is wrong here - the whole city is on strike. The two tour guides, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, do not want to comment on the matter. A murmur goes around about an incident the day before…

A documentary that follows Palestinian landowners as they make their annual visits to lands now trapped behind the Israeli separation wall, near the area of Jabal Abu Ghneim—today the site of the Har Homa settlement southeast of Bethlehem. These lands, once accessible and cultivated freely, are now subject to military restrictions and bureaucratic barriers imposed by the settler colonial regime.

An exploration of the intimacy that arises between a swimming coach and athlete. In the film, I return to meet my coach five years after having quit competitive swimming and ask to recreate a recurring situation from my teenage years, in which he gives me a massage and I massage him in return.

Created by UNICEF, the film portrays the immense challenges of carrying out a polio vaccination campaign in the midst of war, while highlighting the extraordinary determination and dedication of people like Dr. Younis Awadallah.

Commissioned by the Locarno Film Festival for its 75th anniversary, 11 international filmmakers were invited to create a ‘Postcard from the Future’ from their respective countries. Annemarie Jacir’s entry, From Palestine with Love, depicts in one potent shot a concrete barrier wall falling down to reveal a tranquil beach with waves crashing softly at the shore and a child playing in the sand.

Between the uprising of 2000, the Dignity Uprising of 2021, and the war on Gaza in 2023, the specter of fear looms over Palestine, deeply ingrained in its psyche and spirit, leaving behind unforgettable scars.

Despite their children's reluctance, Radi and Mounira, a 65-year-old puppeteer couple, set off on tour between Israel and Palestine in their outdated van. They are exhausted from having to set up and take down the stage, from performing three shows in a row in front of hundreds of wild children under a burning sky. Lost in Jericho, frightened by the bombs falling near Majd Al Shams, destabilized by the Bedouin children of the Negev unable to determine their own identity, they no longer know if their mission is still relevant. Safeguarding the identity of their people through their shows, but at what cost? A quest for Palestinian identity.

Ahlam, a young Palestinian fashion designer plans to open her own atelier in Gaza city. With the opening date approaching, things take a different path than what she is planning. But with a name like Ahlam, meaning dreams in Arabic, her ambitions won’t fade.

Prisoner follows the story of a son, Adam (12 years old), who comes to realize, as he enters adolescence, that the imprisonment of his father, Saeed, is the source not only of tales of adventure but also of stories of horror and torture.

One of 13 short films produced by the Palestinian Filmmakers’ Collective in the omnibus collection Palestine, Summer 2006.

This film travels over open books, looted objects and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape the film focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places. Objects held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. The film explores the substantial wealth accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labour, knowledge and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonisers’ cameras.

Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the "Jewish State"; it had a peaceful reputation, but it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish "defense" force. The Haganah authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover. In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. Fifty-three orphaned children were dumped along the wall of the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage.

Describe the harsh reality attempts of establishing a Jewish settlement in Israel and the efforts of the Arab to prevent it. The film is considered as the first talking film in Palestine Israel.

‘Orthodox Intifada’ is a feature documentary set in the Bethlehem region, a Palestinian area in the core of what is known as the ‘Holy Land’. Following extraordinary characters from the local Christian community, it deals with the social and political effects of the Greek control over the Roman Orthodox church and this Palestinian Christian community. The story unfolds through the eyes of the local filmmaker accompanying friends and relatives who fight for their community’s rights. At the same time, she attempts to come to terms with her upbringing and social norms.

The Key was made by Ghaleb Sha'ath to accompany the Palestine delegation to the 1976 UN Habitat conference in Vancouver. It is the first Palestinian film produced by Samed Cinema Production Foundation.

A young boy living at the top of a mountain discovers a mysterious forest nearby. His decision to follow a strange creature and venture into the forest will alter his fate forever.

A film that tells a part of Palestinian citizen's life under occupation

The last Station is a personal experience of Exile, Return and the Dream of a Homeland. This journey between the Dream and the Reality contains lots of happiness, hope and yet disappointments.

3 CM LESS (the title comes from projections that the Palestinian children of today will grow up on average three centimeters shorter than their parents, thanks to the deprivations of occupation) is a complex, highly personal look at the impact decades of war has wreaked on families and friendships.

Traces the five-minute walk that Iyad Hallaq, a disabled boy, would take from his family’s home to the special needs institute where he attended class — the same route upon which he would be senselessly killed by a sniper.

In 1973, Shirak directed this short film in which the games of Palestinian children increasingly merge with warfare. Remnants of combat, such as bullets and tanks, are the toys of a group of young boys. When one of them finds a casing of a bombshell, their band disperses into a haunting game of hide and seek. This film was recovered as a part of a cache of archival films about various aspects of the Palestinian liberation movements that were found in Tokyo and therefore dubbed the “Tokyo Reels.”

Warde, shamed as a young girl yet renowned in Palestine for her mystical seeing and matchmaking lives with her sister Jaleleh and reads the fortunes of her clients. Each woman has made or will make a choice between love and marriage, not having had the luxury of both.

The film features two Palestinian boys - Qais and Firas. Shot on the coast of Dead Sea, with the view of Palestine across the water. The film is guided by poetry of Mahmoud Darwish - one of Arab foremost poets.

Yair, returns home from military service in the West Bank. He invites Yaara to his family’s bourgeois Jerusalem home. They play piano and open a bottle of wine. What seems to start as peaceful weekend together, is interrupted by a story about an innocent family whose house he invaded on the previous evening.

When the Israeli army invades the Gaza Strip in 2023, Rania is eight months pregnant. She gives birth to triplets just as her hometown in northern Gaza is bombed. One girl dies at birth, while the other two babies, Jowan and her brother Hamoud, are so weak that they have to be placed in an incubator. When the hospital is evacuated, the twins are moved to southern Gaza, where Rania’s sister Nisreen takes over their care. A travel ban prevents the babies from returning to their mother.

Three Palestinian siblings attempt to visit their bedridden grandfather who resides on the other side of the separation wall.

Route 181 is the epic record of a road trip undertaken in the summer of 2002 by two filmmakers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, along sections of what had been designated as the border between Israel and Palestine by U.N. Resolution 181 in 1947.

Aws, a theatre actor from Gaza, returns to his destroyed neighborhood. Under the rubble of one home lies his beloved Nour, along with all their dreams of a life together.

Shayma’ was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out. More than twenty years later, she opens a box of old videotapes that starts her search for memories. In voice-over she addresses her mother, who says she is blessed with a poor memory. Shayma’, by contrast, still remembers exactly what she wore on her first day of school: her new school uniform with a lace collar and a white bow in her hair. She also remembers spying her birthday cake through a crack in the kitchen door of their house, which had been confiscated by Israeli soldiers.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been waging war in retaliation for Operation Al Aqsa. The scale of this war and the massacres being carried out are taking on proportions that make it a genocide that does not speak its name. Drawing on a variety of sources, the film aims to question these acts, which refuse to be called into question.

The war in Gaza has killed nearly 16,000 children since October 2023, most of whom have died in indiscriminate bombings. Yet a deeply unsettling subset of these deaths stands apart - children arriving at trauma centres with gunshot wounds. Doctors in Gaza report seeing these cases nearly every day. Their accounts, corroborated across hospitals and over time, suggest a disturbing pattern. This is not random. It is systematic. This film investigates these atrocities through the testimonies of healthcare workers from the United States who witnessed them and tells the story of four-year-old Mira al-Darini. Mira was shot in the head outside her family’s tent in Khan Younis but survived against all odds, thanks to Dr Mimi Syed on her first mission to Gaza. Mira’s case is not isolated. American doctors describe treating dozens of children with nearly identical injuries, linking these horrors to the Israeli military, supported heavily by US funding.

".... I used to ... all Palestinian kids in Israel, used to hold the Israeli flag and sing for Israel in Arabic. Each year we used to do that, to celebrate, we would prepare dance shows, theater plays and songs! A lot of decorations and flags everywhere... And no one said anything. Imagine we used to stand on lines at the schoolyard each with his little blue and white flag. But the next day which is the Independence Day, a free day when all families and friends were supposed to go out on a picnic somewhere, or to the beach... my father always used to be sick and we never left the house on that specific day.

An extensive journalism project directed by Palestinian journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh. The documentary provides a comprehensive insight into the Palestinian resistance men that directed and participated in the raid of the "Nahal Oz" Military base during the 2014 war on the Gaza Strip. The program delves into the strategic, tactical role that the resistance's tunnel technology plays in their battles.

Operation « Rainbow » resulted in the death and wounding of many residents of Gaza. Director Abdel Salam Shehadeh tells the story of the aftermath of this bombing, searching the memory (including his own) of those who were torn apart by this attack : « These are people who have crossed my path. Some of them rose from among the debris, carrying their tears. Some were looking for answers to worries that haunted them. Others were exhausted by contemplating reality. They were like me…

Using their bare hands, married couple Htwe Tin and Thein Shwe draw oil from a pit they drilled themselves on the land next to their house. There are lots of these “artisanal” oilfields dotted around Myanmar, where people have swapped crop cultivation for selling the oil they pump from the ground by hand.

We are taken behind the scenes of a play in-the-making: The play is Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT—starring a group of young 48-Palestinians. One by one, we are introduced to a variety of characters: the play’s director, actors, and other ordinary people. As we delve further into each of their lives, the film reveals the startling parallels between the themes of the play and their own. Everyone is waiting for something: a permit to build a house, better work conditions, a starring role in a film. Much like Waiting for Godot, our heroes are awaiting Faraj Allah… something that may or may not come.

When a Palestinian man is blackmailed with footage of him having sex with another man, he and his family are forced to make a terrible decision: collaborate with the Israeli occupation or be publicly shamed. Based on true stories.

Samir, 43, is the owner of a shoe shop in Ramallah who has never seen the sea. He decides to sneak past Israeli borders with other Palestinian construction workers to fulfill his dream of seeing the sea.

What drives a young, well-educated Westerner to volunteer as a “peace activist” in the Middle East? Caiomhe Butterly is one of a growing number of volunteers who risk their own safety to intervene in the long-running and bloody conflict between Israel and Palestine. Several internationals, including her, have now been injured. Some have died. In this film, she describes witnessing the aftermath of the attack on Jenin in April 2002. The film follows her work, the main emphasis being “the accompaniment of communities at risk”. Despite being threatened, shot in the leg and deported later that year, she is determined to go back.

A group of friends in Occupied Palestine make maqloubeh.

Two Palestinian lovers, parted during the 60s when he is imprisoned for resisting the Israeli occupation and she sorrowfully emigrates to the US, come together again in Jerusalem some 18 years later. He works for an agricultural aid organization, she is a scholar researching the meaning of sacrifice in Palestinian society. Around them rages the turmoil of the first Intifada.

A woman drives her car around Jerusalem, asking Israelis for directions to Ramallah. She receives contradictory answers. A World Apart Within 15 Minutes is one of 13 short films directed by Palestinian filmmakers and produced by the Palestinian Film Collective for the "Summer 2006, Palestine" project.

The road from Jerusalem to Ramallah.