Discoveries from Palestinian Territories World Cinema

An animator retraces his memories of childhood through illustration. He recalls a familial hero, who he once longed to emulate.

Baisanos follows the fans of the Club Deportivo Palestino, weaving a dialogue between Chile and Palestine. Through reflections on identity and return, two distant lands connect in a space of celebration, where hope for victory is the promise of a possible future.

Our homes resemble us. They are our memories and our futures. Right now, 150,000+ Palestinians are at risk of losing their homes. At the heart of Israel’s apartheid system is to deny Palestinians a home. Help end demolitions and forced evictions. Take action with Amnesty International now.

Roberta finds her recipe for love.

In the heart of the Gaza Strip, four men navigate through divergent paths in pursuit of their definitions of existence, intertwining their fates amidst the complexities of life, love, and survival.

Shot in Norway and Palestine, The Goodness Regime investigates the foundations of the ideology and the representation of a country adopting the most corporate gimmicks to brand itself as a peace-making nation. Deconstructing the arcanes of the Oslo Accords and unveiling the process of a national myth construction, the film looks at the political stages, the roles and the scenes through the very empirical spectrum of theatre, combining children's performances with archive sound recordings from diplomatic speeches.

Palestine in the Eye chronicles the profound impact of Hani Jawharieh’s death for the PLO Film Unit. The film reflects on his life through interviews with family, colleagues, and his own cinematography, including the moment of his death while filming for the Unit in 1976. Although the film has later been attributed to Mustafa Abu Ali, the Unit’s method of work was to describe everyone as a collective of “workers,” and we see this in the film titles, which collectively list the names of all those who participated as a non-hierarchical collective. Through this reflection on Jawharieh, we are offered an understanding of the workings of the Palestine Film Unit and its international connections.

Two young people try to record music inside the camp for a competition. If they succeed, they have the chance to make a music album. Because of the chaos and problems in the camp, things go wrong at first. Finally, the two come up with the idea of recording the sounds of the camp instead — and turning them into music…

In a valley veiled by fog and tribal codes, two sisters walk into the night not as daughters, but as offerings— where blood, memory, and silence attempt to keep the fire from spreading.

The drama, the story of three childhood friends and a young woman who are torn apart in their fight for freedom, is billed as the first fully-financed film to come out of the Palestinian cinema industry.

The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? Notes on Displacement takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity is palpable.

A Palestinian-American teenager hooks up with a disaffected youth and they set out to clean up the town. This hilarious coming-of-age tale with a Western flavor carries a bittersweet, political edge. Director Annemarie Jacir's first film. Set in Texas.

The film depcits the life of the orphans of Tel al-Zaatar Martyrs in “Bait el-Sumud”, the house which was set for them by the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW). It recounts the sufferings that Palestinian children endure in diaspora camps and under the Israeli occupation.

One family as an entire community Hreash House shows an extended Palestinian family living a collective existence in a concrete block in Nazareth. It shows a feast and its aftermath during Ramadan.

Adas Falastin is a documentary focusing on Khalil Al Naja, who turns his passion for cooking into a protective shield against famine by creating a community kitchen to feed Gazans, preserving the spirit of resilience and hope within his community.

Emptiness tells the story of Bilal and his journey home, during which he meets people who reflect his own suffering due to war and the devastation that surrounds them.

Julie and Waleed, two kids on the cusp of their teenage years, escape the pressures of societal and political noise in Palestine, embarking on a brief adventure in nature that will linger in their memories like a dream.

A twelve year-old boy aspires to become a news reporter.

Unseen footage of Gaza’s beauty and the resilience of its residents, captured by Palestinian filmmaker and journalist Yousef Alhelou. This unique personal film, shot just weeks before the genocide began, shows rare footage of Gaza before its destruction and now serves as an archive of its past. In July 2023, Yousef Al-Helou, a London based Palestinian journalist and film maker returned home to Gaza. Al-Helou, a prolific traveller, frequently shared his journeys on his YouTube and Instagram channels. Equipped with a camera he recorded what was to become some of the last footage of Gaza before Israel’s October 8th 2023 assault on the territory.

Using only rare archival and newsreel footage, this film tells the story of Palestine from the nineteenth century through current times.

Feeling confined in his small Palestinian town and close-knit community, Kamel, a young man, embarks on a journey to discover his personal freedom and privacy.

Akram left his native Arab village to work as a construction worker in Tel Aviv. Secretly he is in love with an Israeli actress living downstairs in his building. The film deals with the cultural gap between urban and rural space.

After an Israeli raid causes the two brothers, Milad and Samy, to lose everything, they decide to rent out audio equipment for various occasions, in an attempt to gather enough money to emigrate to Canada.

Female soldiers in Israel return to combat roles after 75 years, facing the psychological aftermath of war. Through personal accounts, the film explores their battlefield experiences and struggles with PTSD in Gaza and Lebanon.

This film tells the story of a group of young people from Gaza staging a Palestinian version of the Odyssey, which they have re-written and interpreted. It has been a success. The story of Ulysses, the Greek hero from Homer's saga, is about home. Home is an important concept that characterizes the entire long journey. Ulysses was driven from his home after the battle of Troy. Many people in Gaza are displaced due to bombs or occupation. The film discusses the realization of the show, from the initial stages of writing to the performance, but it also seeks to understand how Ulysses' message can be articulated in this place. It addresses the meaning of home in Gaza, how people try to maintain it, and the struggle to survive against everything that seeks to destroy it.

The dancing girl loses members of the dance group, during war and asylum she begins a journey to search for them, she manages to communicate with them spiritually.

A helicopter sweeps the desert, surveying a land at once ancient and modern, natural and built. Farmers work their fields, children play and bells sound a call to prayer. Dynamite ruptures the earth. UNDR is a poignant found-footage essay film about an otherworldly landscape charged with history and potential that has become an eerie site of surveillance and incursion.

TRIP ALONG EXODUS is a feature-length documentary exploring the last 70 years of Palestinian politics seen through the prism of the life of Dr Elias Shoufani, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, an academic writer and leftist intellectual who worked with Fateh (but was one of the leaders of the opposition to Arafat) for 20 years. He is also the father of the filmmaker and writer, Hind.

Iraqi writer and director Kassem Hawal’s 24 minute film Our Small Houses is one of the few surviving works made by the cinema group Hawal founded and led under the Central Information Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Badly damaged and often overlooked in histories of revolutionary film, it combines lucid Marxist-Leninist analyses with striking montage techniques.

In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion, archival images and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.

Cowboy uses the images from American cinema to expose the country’s settler colonial structure and its ability to depict genocidal acts through camera framing. The film, directed by the renowned Egyptian film critic Sami Al-Salamoni, reflects his theoretical critique of Hollywood through heavily edited scenes and shots from mainstream motion pictures. Al-Salamoni manages to take the audience through the history of commercialized image production towards a transnational solidarity image production as a response.

This film focuses on an old Palestinian man who is the subject of artist Ismail Shammout’s painting Memories and Fire. The film unravels his memories using archival photographs and Shammout’s own paintings to tell the story of Palestinian experience and resistance. By simply using a montage of visuals and sounds and avoiding narration, Shammout adopts a style that was used by early Soviet filmmakers who wished to communicate across language boundaries, creating a film that offered an non-verbal narrative of the Palestinian cause. The film was screened at a variety of festivals in the former Soviet Union and won a prize at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week for Cinema and Television in 1973. Recently restored and digitized.

Benjamin, an adolescent boy, arrives on a bus with other boys who are new arrivals at the village. They are introduced to the class. He is still suffering from trauma and begins to hoard bread taken from storage even though the village has no lack of food. He watches other children at work but feels foreign and alienated

The border demarcates the inside and outside. Conceptually two-dimensional and two-sided, but without a clear beginning and end, the border creates a length and not a width. This short film, with no dialogue, cuts between two locations, allowing us to see the very real distinctions of two places on a single day.

A 42 minute documentary film that combines the cactus and the memories it stands for. The film addresses the story of the destruction of the Palestinian villages of Latroun in the Occupied West Bank and the forcible transfer of their civilian population in 1967. Over 40 years later, the Israeli occupation continues, and villagers remain displaced. The film follows two separate but parallel journeys. Aisha Um Najeh takes us down the painful road that Palestinians have been forcefully pushed down, separating them in time and place from the land they nurtured; while Israelis walk freely through that land, enjoying its fruits. The stems of the cactus, however, take a few of them to discover the reality of the crime committed.

Crushed by their unfolding realities, disembodied anonymous Palestinian voices wander occupied lands, where the dissonance is deafening.

Jaffa, the city of oranges, was the home of many Arab families for centuries until it was all taken over in 1948. 'My Jaffa' is the story told by some if those families about the lives they led in Jaffa before 1948. They tell us what it was like to grow up by the sea and what it was like to be a part of the booming Jaffa orange industry. This is their personal journey from living in their homes, going to school then overnight having to run away and escape.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine spokesman Ghassan Kanafani interviewed by Richard Carleton, Beirut 1970.

The film revolves around an Arab theater troupe whose members gather from every war-torn country, rehearsing in preparation for a theatrical performance dealing with the lives of refugees in Sweden.

Nawal moved to Berlin from the West Bank to establish a life away from occupation, leaving behind her mother, an Israeli activist living in the West Bank. A meditation on daughterhood, motherhood and complex inheritance, the film explores the legacies of resistance passed down between Neta and Nawal at a moment of immense turmoil.

The political strategy of manipulating photographs or paintings by removing certain elements or persons has been employed repeatedly throughout history by those in positions of power in order to adjust the historical narrative as it suited them and their idea of the “one truth”. Drawing on the same photograph from 1985, this film precisely examines this ability of photographic images to (de)construct a visual canon and therefore affect memory. The work poses the question: what kind of information can a picture reveal about the past, and what (or who) does it conceal?

Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabalay is on a month long work trip to Norway when the Egypt/Gaza border closes and he is unable to return home. He details his seven year fight to get back to his family, during which time he made his award-winning film, Ambulance.

A lonely chair on an abandoned balcony, a photographer watching it days and nights, a strange thing happens that will change the life of the chair forever.

On a stormy night in Haifa, a man struggles to light his cigarette in the pouring rain – until an unexpected encounter changes everything.

Sisters-in-law Nabila and Sham tell a story about women, marriage and desire during occupation. As the men disappear, the women must confront betrayal, power, and survival on their own terms.

The Holy month of Ramadan is a time of reflection, community, and giving, but for a group of circus enthusiasts, it's also a time to bring joy to Gazan children.

A testimony of love dedicated to the sea of Gaza, its stories, myths, and heroes. In two parallel timelines, it follows the journey of a Palestinian rowing champion striving to achieve her dream and the story of a fisherman and marine rescuer who has spent his life by the Gaza Sea.

The Bethlehem-based Ma'an News Agency (MNA) emerged out of the ashes of the second Intifada to become the only independent news network in the Palestinian Territories and an increasingly prominent and influential journalistic force in the wider Middle East. Live: From Bethlehem tells MNA's remarkable story. It chronicles the agency's struggles and successes through the eyes of the station's reporters, producers, and photographers, in the process quietly revealing the humanity of ordinary Palestinians as they go about their daily business. The documentary trains its focus on people more than on abstract issues, yet it never loses sight of the myriad social and political forces and pressures that Ma'an journalists are forced to negotiate as they try to gather and report balanced information. What results is an admirably nuanced portrait of how news gets produced, and how Palestinians live, in one of the world's most troubled regions.

A filmmaker’s journey to find a moment of joy in the midst of unimaginable destruction, death and loss in Gaza.

text: "Caviares del mundo, uníos!" (Caviars/Champagne Socialists of the World, Unite!) —César Hildebrandt /// image: A Zionist Aggression (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973)

Palestinian children in the West Bank city of Hebron risk being attacked by Israeli soldiers as they try to go to school each morning. The children are kept under curfew for months at a time, making it impossible for them to travel on the “Israeli only” streets to get to school.

A juxtaposition of video, photography, and paintings intercut with an artist working on a painting that is completed at the end of the film.

The film examines a personal attempt to address existential concepts related to Palestinians such as exile, return and the image of the homeland.

The story of a country that is obliged to give up on its future... The documentary pictures the town of Tor famous for its coal mines located in the north of Afghanistan, which most of us haven’t even heard of, and the tragedy of the children that are obliged to work there.

Tareq Samhan, a former fighter with the Al-Qassam Armed Forces (Hamas), is released after 13 years in prison. Tareq's story and the images captured by the filmmaker provide a snapshot of Palestine today.

A young Palestinian living in a refugee camp in 1949 struggles to escape the imminent death when him and his little brother heedlessly enter a minefield.

A Palestinian comedy short made by Chaim Halachmi.

The angel of history will rise, awaken the dead, and rebuild what has been destroyed; for ‘We have on this earth what makes life worth living’.

Ismail, a Palestinian director long denied the freedom to travel, finally sets out on a journey tracing the path Christ walked two thousand years ago, from Nazareth to Jerusalem, seeking stories of miracles and legends. He is surprised to find the route now crowded with refugee camps, witnessing their stories, dreams, and resilience. This cinematic journey blends history with the present, the spontaneous with the deliberate, and explores the ongoing impact of the Nakba on Palestinian life and identity.

The harsh symbolism captures the complexities of truth in Gaza, where nothing is straightforward or easily defined.