Discoveries from Palestinian Territories World Cinema

During the invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009 by the Israeli army, 1400 people were killed - there of 400 children. By the time the last cries of protest died down those names were already forgotten.

Ana men Chile means “I am from Chile” in Arabic, and introduces the paradox of contemporary national identity, particularly in the case of the artist who is a Jewish / Palestinian descent but also a Chilean citizen. This situation allows the author to demonstrate the conflict from a broad tour of the occupied territory, with the freedom of being a foreigner. Above you can hear Palestinian descendants from Chile – home to the largest Palestinian community living outside the Middle East – who from their own subjectivity reflect on the future of Palestine, as well as on their own memories.

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.

From the personal photo album of Palestinian photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawherieh, El Hassan reconstructs the last five minutes of Hani Jawherieh’s life, who was killed while filming in the mountains in Lebanon. The five minutes were featured in Palestine in the Eye (1977) a film made by the Palestine Film Institute to commemorate the life of one of it’s founders. Yet, forty-two years later, what motivates these images takes on a different turn in A Remake of a Revolutionary Film.

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.

Between the hills of the West Bank and the Mediterranean coast, filmed on an iPhone over the past year.

The documentary film "Former Freedom Fighter" documents the lives of fighters who carried weapons in defense of Palestine and spent years of their lives in the occupation's prisons. After their liberation, they lived a life different from the one they had dreamed of.

A Palestinian fisherman tries to breach the naval blockade in Gaza to get treatment for his sick daughter

Land Day is commemorated by Palestinian annually on March 30. On that day in 1976, Palestinian citizens of Israel rebelled against the attempts of the ruling authorities to expropriate and colonize large swathes of their lands around six villages in the Galilee. Palestinians announced a general strike and organized marches in different Arab towns, where violent confrontations with the police erupted resulting in six martyrs amongst the demonstrators. Since then, the 30th of March was marked as a national day in which Palestinians show unity and intention to defend their land and the attachment to their national identity. Yom El Ard recounted the events of that day and documented the first anniversary activities. It features interviews with victims of violence, mayors of the affected villages and shows rarely seen footage of that era.

Inspired by memories of her grandmother and the delicious food of her childhood, Vivien Sansour wants to reintroduce long forgotten Palestinian produce to the tables of people across the West Bank and beyond. And she believes these organic, climate change-resistant seeds are the key to that. She experiments with growing the treasured seeds in her own garden beside the separation wall, under the watchful eye of Israeli soldiers. Popular local herbs and seasonal vegetables flourish as she tends to her garden with expert care and dreams of reviving and celebrating Palestinian food culture. But can she persuade farmers struggling with the pressures imposed by the Israeli occupation and agri-business to embrace such traditional crop-growing methods? To convince them of the value of the seeds, she sets up a travelling kitchen, taking her seeds and their produce on the road and reminding Palestinians of the power of food to capture the joy and beauty of home.

The film explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. Images of women performing draw connections between latent stories of water wells and communal rituals associated with disappearance, mourning and death. The only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales.

When the French authorities closed their borders, landed their planes, confined their citizens to their homes, spreading the police on the streets. I was in Paris. Without any planning, the memory coming from Palestine began to flow and merge with the diaries I live here, and the virus began to awaken other viruses, which made me spontaneously, as a Palestinian citizen, besieged in the most beautiful Parisian neighbourhood (Montmartre), busy documenting aspects of diaries and memories in a period of time that changed the face of the scientist.

After the destruction of the Palestinian village of Ma’loul in 1948 and the forced displacement of its inhabitants, the site remains uninhabited. Each year, former residents are allowed to return for a single day, gathering among the ruins to share memories, recount the village’s past, and introduce younger generations to a place they cannot permanently inhabit, sustaining collective history through ritual return and testimony.

An evocative lyrical and visual tribute to the life of late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, this thoughtful film by director Nasri Hajjaj takes us on a journey through Darwish's life. The camera travels through cities and towns the poet lived in, meeting writers and lovers of his work and overlaying the mosaic of memories and reflections with readings of Darwish's works throughout. This heartwarming documentary is a fitting epitaph to a man whose words epitomized the Palestinian experience and inspired people across the world.

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.

An encounter with three young Palestinian refugee filmmakers from the Deisheh camp, focused on their cinema endeavours. The encounter takes place via the recording machine, a Super 8 Nizo camera. Their discussion about making films as Palestinian refugees, about what it is to make films in Palestine, alternates with their own gestures, their views on the camp.

This short documentary collects the oral history testimonies of five Palestinian women living inside Israel today. Four of the women are internally displaced refugees, unable to return to their villages and homes despite remaining within the boundaries of what became Israel in 1948, the fifth remains a resident of her original village, Tarshiha in the northern Galilee. The film aims to convey through these testimonies a sense of women's lives in rural Palestinian communities prior to, during, and after the Nakba, and by doing so to contribute to a fuller understanding of the different and vital roles played by Palestinian women during this period. The documentation forms part of a wider series of oral history projects undertaken by the Zochrot organisation in Israel.

A Palestinian family forced to flee Gaza during the war following October 7, 2023, as they struggle to rebuild their lives in Egypt.

Ram(z)I is a lonely, working-class man who died twice. Ram(z)I was renamed as soon as his first body died to die again in Jerusalem, buried under a dusty ground while digging for artifacts of a 6000 year-old ancient city. This film explores the obsession of a settler state that continuously excavates to find artifacts to trace history and invent a new one.

Two Palestinian refugee women from different generations are connected through traditional embroidery. Between Al-Baqa’a refugee camp and Amman, stitching becomes a way to preserve memory, express identity and pass stories from one generation to the next.

Dar Al – Kalima University College Of Arts & Culture – workshop di Salim Bujaba

For over a year, Roxane Borgna and Laurent Rojol traveled through the countryside and cities of Palestine, collecting interviews with women. These women questioned their rights and spoke of their quest for freedom. The team followed them in their daily lives to observe their behaviors through the lens of lived experience. They engaged in dialogue to decipher their inner worlds, to understand their dreams, their nightmares, their obsessions.

A father who lost his memory ten years ago due to an explosion in 2014 regains it after one during the 2024 war.

In Selfies, Reema Mahmoud, a displaced woman in Gaza, shares her struggles during the war through a letter in a bottle in which she talks about the beautiful life she once had. She hopes her message will inspire people to appreciate their lives and cherish peace.

A Palestinian mother-to-be in the Netherlands grapples with emotional and physical challenges during pregnancy. Through intimate reflections, she confronts pain, uncertainty, fear of bodily changes, and an identity crisis, all while challenging societal norms around motherhood. Torn between her personal struggles and the devastation in Gaza, she feels guilt and shame, questioning her right to feel pain and wrestling with her privilege while others endure unimaginable suffering.

A rag-tag team of 44 international peace activists board two ramshackle fishing boats in Cyprus, determined to sail to Gaza to break Israel's illegal siege on the people there. They break the siege of Gaza. Refusing to be intimidated, only one thing could stop them; and that was themselves.

The video is based on a research that follows cases of seventeen exhibitions by Palestinian artists, each contained different artworks and exhibited in different countries around the world, the 17 exhibitions are considered missing today due to the challenges caused by the Israeli government associated with returning the artworks to Palestine. The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost follows one of these cases, an exhibition that took place in 2005 in the swiss town of Martigny, the works could not be returned to the artists and were instead moved from a country to another and from one storage facility to another.

Gaza December 7, 2023 - “As a hand rises on the brink of death and shipwreck…”, poet Reefat Alareer appeals one last time to love.

Abu Jameel owns a small stationary in Ramallah. Nothing changed in his shop since the fifties. The lack of freedom of movement and military raids leave him with a general sense of insecurity. Director Nahed Awwad, approaches him gently, with tenderness, asks him about his dreams, his past, and his … secret rooms…

Amid Gaza's ruins, Aya's voice rises, seeking refuge in music, dreaming of peace, and the road back home.

Palestinian gamers transform a video game into an act of resistance, intertwining reality and fiction in a tale of survival and colonialism.

Tells the story of one of the world’s most courageous journalists, Bisan Owda from Gaza.

What will be the legacy of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon? Will he be remembered as a man of peace or a war criminal? In the refugee camps of Lebanon, the shadow of the Sabra and Shatila massacre darkens every day. Here, people regard Sharon as the man who authorised a genocide. Who ordered the Israeli army to surround the camps, let the Christian militias in and did nothing as they massacred thousands of innocent civilians. Our offering this week is the definitive documentary on Sabra and Shatila. It centres on four survivors who spearheaded the campaign to bring Sharon to trial. Includes shocking archive of the massacre.

A creative reimagination of the Israeli-Arab conflict through the lens of the classic Arabian Nights tales, with Scheherazade narrating a story where Aladdin's magic lamp is stolen by an Israeli soldier, prompting Sindbad and Ali Baba to join forces to recover it. Will Aladdin retrieve his magic lamp?

Mays is 22 years old, lives in occupied Palestine and works at the Palestinian Circus School. She is planning a life together with her Swedish boyfriend, Caspar and she intends to study at the University of Stockholm. However, the road from dream to reality is not easy. Mays is juggling between her family’s expectations and Swedish bureaucracy.

In Jabalia Refugee Camp, the most densely populated camp in a very small space, life and laughter emerged from its alleys. There, guests are invited to share a cup of mint tea, and because not all surfaces are made of stones and wires, life is created on rooftops with flowers and green leaves.

In the light of the phenomenon of detaining the bodies of martyrs in refrigerators during the ongoing war of genocide which the Israeli occupation has been carrying out since 2015, the director of the film enters the martyrs’ homes and narrates what their mothers are experiencing in their children’s absence.

Since Israel was established and its legislature — the Knesset — first convened, Palestinian lawmakers have served alongside Jewish ones. They’ve included poets, playwrights, philosophers, doctors, lawyers, educators and feminist activists. Be they communists, liberals, nationalists, or Islamists — every Arab parliamentarian steps up to the podium with pain, frustration, anger, and hope (otherwise they wouldn’t be there). Yet, regardless of tone or tenor (provocative, poignant, polarizing, or pacifying), most of their words fall on deaf ears. Were we to listen to a collection of 3-minute speeches by these parliamentarians, what would we hear? A hungry appeal for a rightful place at the civic table, rather than the carrot, the stick, and civil rights crumbs begrudgingly swept off of it.

Single-screen version of Emily Jacir's installation work, WE ATE THE WIND. 2023, 31 min, digital.

Events of the feature film revolve around a group of Palestinian youth who were forced by life circumstances to emigrate from Gaza Strip in 2012, to lose their tracks after boarding a smuggling boat from the shores of Alexandria in Egypt

17-year-old Adva goes on a night journey from her life in a West Bank settlement to fulfil her fantasy of kissing and fucking a woman.

For a year, Reham talks with Zeina about her dream of studying abroad and her attempts to leave Gaza under blockade for 12 years. Their messages vacillate between good and bad tidings, excitement and disappointment, losing hope then retrieving it.

The story of how a small group of teenagers created a skate scene from scratch in a place where you can't even buy a skateboard, whilst facing the challenges of living under military occupation.

High Roads is a journey through the practices of four women who use their bodies, breath, and minds as tools for everyday resistance to military occupation. Filmed between Palestine and Barcelona, High Roads dialogues with particle physicist Dr. Wafaa Khater, Olympian swimmer Sabine Hazboun, marathon-runner Diala Isid and yoga instructor Eilda Zaghmout: four women who generate well-being and wonder, betting on action and astonishment, in defiance of a relentless oppression.

Material filmed during and after the battle of Amman, in September 1970. The images document the rubble after the bombings, showing displaced people in the hall of a building, among the ruins, inside schools, while they are being treated . Some moments of a Yasser Arafat rally are also filmed.

By using images drawn by Palestinian children between the ages of 9 and 12, ‘Drawing for Better Dreams’ takes us to the Occupied Territories and into the minds of the kids who live there under siege. By animating the simple crayon drawings, this moving film conjures up the struggles faced by Palestinian children on a daily basis, and demonstrates the power of – and need for – allowing young people to dream.

Documentary: memories of Palestinian citizens about their occupied homeland

Beneath the shadow of the massive attack in Gaza-strip, 4 women: Israelis and Palestinians are trying to meet. The rift, doubts and shock from this attack are putting in question their capability to maintain or deepen the relations.

Paths of lives are crossed in one village in the west bank. Along the broken water pipelines, villagers walk on their courses towards an indefinite future. Israel that controls the water resources, supplies only a small amount of water, and when the water streams are not certain nothing can evolve. The control over the water pressure not only dominates every aspect of life but as well dominates the spirit. a film by Alexandre Goetschmann & Guy Davidi.

A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing tech- niques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. The film won the prize as best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and was screened at multiple festivals. It was the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.

Two artists go on an artistic tour somewhere forbidden for them. Which threatens their freedom by imprisonment.

During the First Intifada, Atef is chased by the Israeli army and finds himself trapped in an entrance of a house. The owner, an old lady, hides him. Atef is surprised that there is another person inside, who helps him not to be arrested.

When Nadine hears about her best friend’s fear of an unwanted pregnancy, she takes the lead of the rescue. Together they embark on a frustrating, confidential and sometimes funny journey of getting pregnancy tested, while their conservative reality turns the simple act into an actual threat. Through Nur’s conflict, and within the reflection of her dad, Nadine finds herself searching for her own truth, independence and freedom.

Nassim visits his best friend May, before she moves to the United States. They spend their last night together in Jerusalem. The events of the night bring to surface the complexity of their friendship.

After his father's prized sheep goes missing, Yousef devises a strategy to keep the truth buried.

Filmed in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon, Terrace of the Sea uses a collection of family photographs taken over three generations as a prism through which to reflect on memory, loss and history. An anthropologist, author (her most recent book is "Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile) and filmmaker, Diana Allan documents the experiences of the Ibrahim family, who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The film looks at their relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they've persevered in this ‘temporary' home. Produced at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Terrace of the Sea is a haunting work, a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and film, land and sea and - between seeing and being seen.

A Palestinian comedy short made by Chaim Halachmi.

Corner Store is about family, community and patience, told through the eyes of a man who has spent 10 years living the back of his store, working long, hard days while waiting to bring his family to San Francisco from their native Palestine.