Budrus follows Palestinian community organiser Ayed Morrar and his teenage daughter Iltezam as their West Bank village organises an unarmed campaign against the route of Israel’s separation barrier.

What makes the film stand out is the coalition that forms around the protest. Local members of Fatah and Hamas participate alongside women from the village, while Israeli activists cross into Palestinian territory to join the demonstrations. Iltezam’s role becomes increasingly central as women move to the front of the campaign, changing both the dynamics of the protest and the expectations within the village itself.

Directed by Julia Bacha and produced by Ronit Avni, Bacha and Palestinian journalist Rula Salameh, Budrus also includes perspectives from Israeli Border Police and military representatives rather than restricting itself to the organisers. The film went on to receive more than 20 international awards, including recognition at Berlin, Tribeca and San Francisco.

Rather than concentrating exclusively on violence or victimhood, the documentary looks at the mechanics of grassroots organising, civil disobedience and what happens when groups normally presented as irreconcilable end up acting alongside one another.

Rashid Masharawi’s Laila’s Birthday follows Abu Laila, a former judge in Ramallah who has been forced to work as a taxi driver after the Palestinian Authority stops paying his salary. Over the course of one increasingly chaotic day, he has one very simple objective: finish work, buy a birthday cake and present, and get home in time to celebrate his daughter Laila’s seventh birthday.

Played by Mohammad Bakri, Abu Laila is a man trying desperately to maintain order, dignity and routine in a place where all three are constantly being disrupted. His passengers pull him into arguments, bureaucracy, petty disputes and wider political absurdities, while the realities of occupation and instability sit quietly behind almost every encounter.

What makes Laila’s Birthday work so well is that it never needs to turn its characters into symbols. The film is funny, frustrating, melancholy and often deliberately mundane. Masharawi uses one ordinary working day to show how political conditions bleed into the smallest parts of daily life, from getting paid to driving across town to simply being home when you promised your child you would be.

It is a much lighter watch than many of the documentaries and historical films posted here, but that does not make it any less political. If anything, its focus on ordinary life is precisely the point. Palestinian existence here is not presented only through violence, resistance or catastrophe, but through work, family, irritation, humour and the stubborn determination to have a normal evening.

Har Mageddon is a meditative essay film that turns the landscape of Palestine and Israel into its central subject. Moving through rural spaces, ruined structures, forests, roads and expanding settlements, the film considers what happens when the physical traces of communities remain even after the people who lived there have been displaced.

Rather than relying on a conventional documentary structure, Har Mageddon asks the viewer to spend time looking at the land itself. Places that can initially appear peaceful or even picturesque gradually reveal another layer of history as the film passes through sites connected to Palestinian villages that were depopulated or destroyed. Landscape becomes evidence, carrying memories that political borders and newer construction cannot entirely erase.

The film is particularly interested in ideas of home, exile, migration and belonging. It explores how territory can simultaneously be lived in, remembered, claimed and transformed, and how apparently empty spaces can remain deeply inhabited by history. Quiet and deliberately paced, Har Mageddon offers a very different way of approaching Palestine, one in which trees, ruins, roads and open ground become part of the historical record.

About two weeks ago, I posted Vanessa Redgrave's 1977 documentary The Palestinian here. I came across this photograph while looking further into what happened after the film was released, and thought it deserved a post of its own.

The photograph was taken by Associated Press photographer Doug Pizac outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on 3 April 1978, during the 50th Academy Awards. AP's caption identifies the people pictured as supporters of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) burning an effigy of Vanessa Redgrave. The demonstration was not simply about Redgrave's politics in the abstract. Contemporary reporting specifically connected the opposition to her involvement with The Palestinian. Before the ceremony, the JDL had announced plans to demonstrate against her nomination, while Palestinian and pro-Palestinian demonstrators planned a counter-protest.

Redgrave had financed and narrated The Palestinian, travelling through Lebanon and Syria and interviewing Palestinians, including members of the PLO and Yasser Arafat. By the time she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Julia, the documentary had become the focus of a campaign against her. The JDL had called for action over the film and her nomination, although its West Coast leader Irv Rubin subsequently said it was no longer seeking a professional boycott of Redgrave. Other figures and organisations in Hollywood, including 20th Century Fox and the Screen Actors Guild, opposed attempts to punish her professionally.

Then, on the night pictured here, Redgrave won the Oscar for Julia. Knowing what was taking place outside gives her subsequently famous acceptance speech rather more context. She praised the Academy for refusing to be intimidated and referred to her opponents as a “small bunch of Zionist hoodlums”, while also pledging to continue fighting antisemitism and fascism. Her remarks drew both applause and boos. Later in the ceremony, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky publicly rebuked her for bringing politics into her acceptance speech.

There is an interesting archival wrinkle. While AP identifies the burning effigy in this photograph as Vanessa Redgrave, some contemporary reporting described protesters burning an effigy of Yasser Arafat. I haven't found enough primary evidence to establish whether two different effigies were burned or whether one was misidentified in contemporary reports, so I'm not going to pretend that discrepancy doesn't exist. What we can establish is that AP identifies this particular photograph as the burning of a Redgrave effigy, and later accounts likewise record Redgrave being burned in effigy.

What makes the photograph worth preserving here is the connection to the film itself. The Palestinian wasn't simply released, reviewed and forgotten. It became embroiled in a political battle that reached all the way to Hollywood's biggest stage. Whatever one's view of Redgrave or the documentary, this photograph is part of the history of its reception.

If you missed it when I posted it here a couple of weeks ago, the full documentary is still available to watch:

Vanessa Redgrave – The Palestinian (1977)

Photograph: Doug Pizac / Associated Press, Los Angeles, 3 April 1978.

Source for the photograph and AP caption: ABC News / Associated Press photograph

Contemporary background: Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 30 March 1978 | Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5 April 1978

The People and the Olive follows a group of American ultramarathon runners attempting to cover 129 miles across the occupied West Bank in five days. Rather than simply documenting the run, director Aaron Dennis uses the journey to introduce the Palestinian farmers, families and communities whose lives remain closely connected to the land and particularly to the olive tree.

As the runners travel from community to community, they learn about farming, fair trade and the economic importance of olive cultivation while participating in efforts to replace uprooted trees. The result is as much a travel and human-interest documentary as a political one, presenting Palestine through landscapes, conversations, meals, farming and ordinary encounters rather than principally through conflict.

At its centre is the olive tree itself: livelihood, inheritance, cultural marker and something planted with the expectation that somebody will still be there decades later to harvest it.

Directed, written and narrated by Abby Martin, and produced and co-written by Mike Prysner, Gaza Fights for Freedom examines life in the Gaza Strip through the events surrounding the Great March of Return, the mass demonstrations that began along the Gaza-Israel boundary in 2018. Produced through The Empire Files, the documentary combines reporting, interviews and extensive footage filmed inside Gaza to present the demonstrations from the perspective of Palestinians taking part in them.

Much of the film centres on the people behind the casualty figures: protesters, journalists, medics, families and organisers living under blockade and participating in the demonstrations.

It documents the conditions inside Gaza, the history invoked by the demand for a right of return, and the response of Israeli forces positioned along the boundary. The filmmakers also examine the shooting of demonstrators, medical personnel and members of the press, placing individual accounts alongside footage recorded during the protests themselves.

The documentary is openly critical of Israeli policy and makes no attempt to disguise its political perspective. That is part of what makes it worth viewing as a documentary rather than simply treating it as neutral news reporting.

Martin and Prysner are making an argument, but they build that argument around extensive material filmed on the ground and the testimony of people whose experiences were often reduced internationally to statistics or short news reports.

Released in 2019, the film has since become one of the more widely viewed English-language documentaries dealing specifically with Gaza and the Great March of Return.

Content warning: contains graphic footage of shootings, serious injuries, death and the aftermath of violence.

Directed and produced by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi for Just Vision, My Neighbourhood was filmed over two years in East Jerusalem and follows Mohammed El-Kurd as a Palestinian boy growing up in Sheikh Jarrah. Wingert-Jabi began filming in the neighbourhood in 2008, and the finished documentary was made by a wider production team that included Palestinian, Israeli and international filmmakers.

After Mohammed’s family is forced to surrender part of their home to Israeli settlers, he, his relatives and their neighbours become part of a campaign resisting further displacement. Rather than beginning with politicians or the wider geopolitical argument, Bacha and Wingert-Jabi stay largely at street and household level. Mohammed is still a child trying to understand why strangers are living in part of his family home while demonstrations, police and activists increasingly become part of everyday life.

The film also documents Israeli activists joining the Palestinian residents in their protests, creating relationships that complicate the usual division of the story into two opposing populations. Its wider production team included executive producer Ronit Avni, with Jessica Devaney, Irene Nasser, Rula Salameh and Vicky Wingert as co-producers. Released in 2012, My Neighbourhood went on to win a Peabody Award and remains an unusually intimate record of Sheikh Jarrah years before the neighbourhood became an international news story.

You can find out more about the production here:

https://justvision.org/myneighbourhood

Directed by Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, Jenin, Jenin was filmed in the aftermath of the Israeli military operation in Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Rather than offering a conventional narrated account, Bakri centres the film almost entirely on the testimony of Palestinian residents, allowing survivors to describe what they witnessed and experienced during and after the fighting.

The documentary became almost as notable for what happened after its release as for the film itself. It was initially banned from commercial screening in Israel, beginning years of court cases and public controversy over censorship, testimony and competing accounts of what happened in Jenin. Those disputes followed Bakri and the film for nearly two decades.

Whatever position a viewer takes on those controversies, Jenin, Jenin remains an important work of Palestinian documentary cinema. It records how the events of 2002 were remembered by people living inside the camp and provides a valuable example of Palestinian filmmakers documenting their own history while that history was still unfolding.

Goal Dreams is a 2006 documentary following the Palestinian national football team as it attempts to qualify for the FIFA World Cup.

The squad brings together Palestinian players from the West Bank, Gaza and the wider diaspora, including footballers based in countries such as Chile, Lebanon and the United States. Before they can even begin functioning as a conventional national side, the team has to contend with players scattered across different countries, travel restrictions, limited facilities and the difficulties of simply assembling everyone in the same place.

Against that background, the film follows the players through training camps and qualification matches as they try to build a cohesive team capable of competing internationally.

Beyond football, Goal Dreams also explores Palestinian identity and belonging through a national team made up of people whose lives and experiences span several continents. For many of the players, representing Palestine gives them a connection to a place they may know through family history as much as through direct experience.

The result is both a sports documentary and a portrait of a national side attempting to represent a population divided by geography, borders and displacement.

The Wanted 18 is a Palestinian-Canadian documentary directed by Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan, set during the First Intifada in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour. The film follows a group of residents who bought 18 cows in an attempt to produce their own milk and reduce their dependence on Israeli suppliers.

What began as a modest experiment in local self-sufficiency soon became something much larger. As the boycott movement gathered momentum, the herd was declared a security threat and the cows were forced into hiding.

Combining interviews, archive material, animation and re-enactment, The Wanted 18 tells the story with an unusually playful tone, using absurdity and humour to explore occupation, civil resistance and everyday life during the uprising.

Beneath the surreal premise is a remarkably human account of how ordinary people tried to create a small measure of independence in extraordinary circumstances.

Directed by Rashid Masharawi, Curfew (1994) is a Palestinian feature set in a refugee camp in Gaza during an Israeli military curfew.

Rather than treating the occupation primarily through battles, speeches or political leaders, Masharawi keeps the focus tightly on an ordinary family confined inside their home. Over the course of the curfew, everyday routines, frustrations, relationships and tensions unfold against the constant presence of military control outside.

The film is particularly effective because very little needs to happen for the occupation to make itself felt. Movement is restricted, time stretches, privacy contracts and the smallest domestic decisions become shaped by circumstances beyond the family’s control.

Masharawi was born in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, and much of his work has focused on Palestinian life under occupation through intimate, everyday stories rather than grand political narratives.

Curfew is an important early Palestinian feature and a strong example of cinema using domestic life itself to show what military occupation means on a human scale.

Filmmaker Tahani Rached turns her camera towards Soraida Abed Hussein, a Palestinian woman living in Ramallah with her family during the Second Intifada.

Rather than approaching Palestine primarily through politicians, military operations or headlines, Soraida, a Woman of Palestine stays close to the rhythms of ordinary life. Soraida talks with friends and relatives, raises her children, reflects on marriage, motherhood, identity and the future, and tries to maintain something resembling normality while checkpoints, curfews and occupation continually intrude.

Much of the film’s power comes from simply allowing people the space to talk. Women discuss their experiences openly, children appear as children rather than symbols, neighbours come and go, meals are prepared, jokes are made and everyday frustrations sit alongside much larger questions about freedom and belonging.

The result is less a conventional political documentary than a portrait of a community seen from inside. Palestine here is not merely a place being argued over. It is somewhere people live, raise families, form friendships, laugh, disagree and imagine their futures.

Following our earlier documentary Palestine Underground, which looked at the people and collectives building Palestine’s underground music scene, here is one of the sets featured in that story in its entirety.

Recorded at Boiler Room’s first Palestine event in Ramallah in 2018, Jazar Crew were part of a Palestinian DIY music and art movement connecting scenes in Haifa, Ramallah and beyond.

Boiler Room’s 2018 documentary follows a generation of Palestinian artists building their own underground music scene across Ramallah and Haifa.

Featuring figures including Sama’ Abdulhadi, Muqata’a, Shabjdeed and Jazar Crew, the film moves through techno, hip-hop and trap while showing the parties, friendships and DIY spaces that developed around them.

Politics and restrictions on movement inevitably shape the world these artists inhabit, but this is first and foremost a film about music, youth culture, creativity and people finding ways to come together.

A very different side of Palestinian life from the material we’ve been showing recently.

Gaza Surf Club is a 2016 documentary directed by Philip Gnadt and Mickey Yamine, following a small community of Palestinian surfers living in the Gaza Strip.

Against a backdrop of blockade, restricted movement and repeated conflict, the film focuses on something deceptively simple: young Palestinians wanting to surf.

For the surfers, the Mediterranean represents both freedom and frustration. The sea stretches beyond Gaza’s borders, yet their ability to travel through the world surrounding them is severely restricted. Surfing becomes an escape, a community and, for some, a glimpse of a different life.

Rather than treating Gaza solely as a place of war, Gaza Surf Club spends time with the people who actually live there, particularly a younger generation trying to build ordinary lives under extraordinary circumstances.

Directors: Philip Gnadt & Mickey Yamine
Year: 2016
Runtime: 1h 27m
Country: Germany / Palestine
Language: Arabic with subtitles

The Time That Remains is Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s semi-autobiographical account of his family and the history that surrounded them, beginning with the Nakba in 1948 and moving through successive decades of Palestinian life.

Drawing partly on his father’s diaries, his mother’s letters and Suleiman’s own memories, the film follows a Palestinian family who remained in their homeland after 1948 and subsequently became citizens of Israel. Suleiman tells that history in his unmistakable style: sparse dialogue, carefully composed images, absurd situations and an extraordinarily dry sense of humour.

Rather than presenting Palestinian history as a conventional historical drama, The Time That Remains concentrates on the strange details of ordinary life: family, resistance, surveillance, memory, ageing and the everyday absurdities created by living within a political reality over which the characters have very little control.

The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2009 and runs for 149 minutes.

Arabic, Hebrew and English with English subtitles.

The Wanted 18 is a Palestinian-Canadian documentary directed by Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan. It tells the true story of a dairy cooperative established in Beit Sahour during the First Intifada, when local residents attempted to reduce their dependence on Israeli goods by producing their own milk.

After purchasing 18 cows and learning how to run the dairy, the cooperative became locally successful. Israeli authorities subsequently ordered the project shut down, and the herd was declared a security threat. The cows were then hidden around the town while soldiers searched for them.

The film combines interviews, archival footage, re-enactments, illustration and stop-motion animation, including sequences told from the cows’ perspective. Beneath the humour, it explores nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, economic self-reliance and community organisation during the First Intifada.

Released in 2014, the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was later selected as the Palestinian submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In Search of Palestine: Edward Said’s Return Home is a 1998 BBC documentary presented by Palestinian-American scholar and literary critic Edward Said and directed by Charles Bruce. Made fifty years after the Nakba, the film follows Said as he returns with his son to the places connected with his childhood and family history, using that personal journey to examine the wider Palestinian experience of dispossession, exile and the question of return.

Said had left Palestine with his family in December 1947, shortly before the establishment of Israel and the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Rather than approaching that history solely through archival material, the documentary places Said physically back within the landscape. He revisits places he remembers from childhood and considers what survives, what has disappeared and how the geography of his memories relates to the political reality he encounters decades later.

The result sits somewhere between historical documentary, political essay and personal memoir. Said’s individual memories repeatedly intersect with the collective history of Palestinians who experienced displacement, dispossession or life under occupation. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies describes precisely this connection between Said’s recollections and Palestinian collective memory as central to the documentary.

But the film is not simply a retrospective on 1948. Much of its significance comes from when it was made. By 1998, the Oslo Accords had been presented internationally for several years as a pathway towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Said had become one of Oslo’s most prominent Palestinian critics, arguing that the process institutionalised rather than ended many of the fundamental inequalities between Israelis and Palestinians.

The documentary allows him to test those arguments against what he encounters on the ground. It examines settlements, segregation and occupation, and includes Said witnessing the displacement of a Bedouin community. He also discusses Arab-Israeli relations with his friend, Israeli-Argentine conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim.

That makes In Search of Palestine particularly interesting historically. The documentary was produced before the collapse of the peace process into the violence of the Second Intifada in 2000, meaning Said’s criticism of Oslo can be heard contemporaneously rather than reconstructed with hindsight. Columbia’s archive specifically notes the film’s critique of the weaknesses of the Oslo framework and its relevance to understanding what followed.

Said himself occupies an unusual position within Palestinian cultural history. Best known internationally for Orientalism (1978), he spent much of his academic career examining how Western institutions represented and constructed ideas about the Middle East. Here, however, the subject is intensely personal. The intellectual examining narratives of displacement is simultaneously someone confronting his own family’s displacement and the uncertain meaning of “home” after decades of exile.

The film therefore asks a deceptively simple question: what does returning mean when the place remembered by the exile and the place that exists in the present are no longer the same?

For an archive of Palestinian cinema, In Search of Palestine is valuable both as a record of Edward Said and as a snapshot of a particular political moment: fifty years after the Nakba, five years after Oslo, and only two years before the Second Intifada fundamentally changed the conflict again.

On 9 April 1948, the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, was attacked by fighters from the Zionist paramilitary organisations Irgun (Etzel) and Lehi (Stern Group). Around 100 Palestinian villagers were killed, including women and children. The attack became one of the most notorious events of the 1948 war and had consequences far beyond the village itself, contributing to fear and flight among Palestinian communities during the period that Palestinians remember as the Nakba.

Deir Yassin: The Agony is a short documentary built principally around the testimony of Zeinab Mohammad Ismail Attieh, who was born in Deir Yassin in 1924 and survived the attack.

Returning to the remains of the village decades later, Attieh walks through the landscape and identifies homes, families and places associated with what she witnessed. Rather than approaching Deir Yassin primarily through military communiqués, political arguments or retrospective historical analysis, the film allows a survivor to reconstruct the village through memory: who lived where, who was killed, where family members hid and how she herself escaped.

Her testimony is intercut with archival footage, photographs and images of the surviving buildings.

The result is less a conventional historical overview than an act of oral history and remembrance. Deir Yassin is presented not simply as the name of an event, but as a community of individual people and families whose lives existed before 9 April 1948.

The documentary is also significant when considering how the organisations involved have subsequently been remembered. Irgun and Lehi became incorporated into the founding narrative of Israel, and prominent members of both organisations later occupied senior positions in Israeli political life. Yet their history did not consist solely of armed resistance against the British Mandate. Deir Yassin remains central to the historical debate over their use of violence against Palestinian civilians.

Whatever broader political interpretation one places on 1948, Attieh’s testimony is an important primary voice from somebody who was actually there.

Please be aware that the documentary contains descriptions and images of people killed during the attack.

Maryse Gargour’s The Land Speaks Arabic is a 61-minute documentary examining the development of political Zionism from the late nineteenth century through the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the consequences of that process for the Palestinian population already living there.

Rather than building its case principally around contemporary political commentary, Gargour works heavily from the historical record. The film uses period newspapers, diplomatic material, official documents, quotations from early Zionist leaders, rare archival footage and testimony from Palestinians who personally remember life before 1948. Historian Nur Masalha also provides historical commentary.

The central question of the film is contained in its title. Political Zionism sought to establish a Jewish national home and ultimately a Jewish state in a territory that was already populated overwhelmingly by an Arabic-speaking society. Gargour asks how early Zionist leaders understood that demographic reality and how they proposed to reconcile it with their political ambitions.

The documentary follows those ideas from the late Ottoman period through the British Mandate and into the events surrounding the Nakba. It argues that the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 should not be understood simply as an accidental consequence of war, but as something with deeper ideological and political roots.

Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies describes the film as using original source documents, Zionist leaders’ quotations, archival footage, eyewitness testimony and interviews with historians to make that case.
What makes the film particularly useful as an archival work is the amount of visual and documentary material it brings together.

Palestine before 1948 is not presented simply as an abstract territory on a map. The surviving footage shows towns, villages and ordinary life, while the written record allows the political ideas developing around that society to be examined alongside what existed on the ground.

Gargour herself was born in Jaffa and later worked as a journalist and producer in Beirut and Paris, including work with French broadcasting and UNESCO. The Land Speaks Arabic was produced in 2007 and is in Arabic, French and English, with English subtitles available on the circulating version.

The film is openly interpretive rather than politically neutral. It advances a clear argument about Zionism, dispossession and the Nakba. But much of its value lies in the primary material it assembles, which means viewers can engage not only with Gargour’s conclusions but with many of the historical documents and images on which those conclusions are based.

The London Palestine Film Festival (LPFF) opened with a Elia Suleiman’s most recent love letter to Palestine: “It Must Be Heaven” (2019). Suleiman first landed in global spotlight for his Palme D’Or nominated black comedy, “Divine Intervention” (2002). This year, he returned with another Palme d’Or nomination and walked away with the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film In Competition. While on the festival circuit, “It Must Be Heaven” garnered plenty of laughter and warm applause at LPFF – and perhaps invited further thought, as a fitting festival opener on redefining “Palestinian cinema.”

What are your thoughts on the film?

Click on the link to read our review: https://asianmoviepulse.com/2019/11/film-review-it-must-be-heaven-2019-by-elia-suleiman/

Aftermath is a 1967 UNRWA documentary directed and reported by Palestinian filmmaker Samir Hissen, documenting the humanitarian consequences of the Six-Day War and the displacement of Palestinians into Jordan.

Filmed in black and white on 16mm, it records the emergency camps established for people displaced by the war, including the shortages of tents and other basic facilities faced as refugees arrived. The film places the events within the longer Palestinian refugee crisis, coming less than twenty years after the mass displacement of 1948.

The documentary is also interesting as a historical artefact in its own right. Although directed by Hissen, it was written and produced by Myrtle Winter of UNRWA’s Department of Public Information. The Palestine Film Institute notes that, like many humanitarian films of this period, Palestinians are largely presented through the institutional perspective of the relief agency rather than being allowed to narrate their own experiences.

Seen almost sixty years later, Aftermath provides contemporary footage of what Palestinians call the Naksa, the displacement associated with the 1967 war, rather than a later reconstruction of those events.

In Palestine Is Still the Issue, journalist John Pilger returns to the West Bank, Gaza and Israel to examine why the conflict remained unresolved more than half a century after the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948.

The film was made during the Second Intifada, at a time of suicide bombings, Israeli military operations, expanding settlements, restrictions on movement and deepening mistrust on both sides. Pilger interviews Palestinians living under occupation as well as Israelis who challenge their government’s policies, including people who had experienced violence personally.

Rather than presenting the conflict as an abstract diplomatic dispute, the documentary focuses heavily on daily life under occupation. Checkpoints, demolished homes, settlements, military control, refugee status and restrictions on movement are used to explore the gap between the language of the peace process and conditions on the ground. Bullfrog Films describes the film as Pilger’s attempt to understand why there had been so little progress towards peace despite decades of negotiations and international attention.

The title deliberately echoes Pilger’s earlier documentary on Palestine. His argument in returning to the same title was that, despite the passage of a generation, the underlying questions of displacement, occupation and Palestinian self-determination remained unresolved.

Kassem Hawal’s Return to Haifa adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella about Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple expelled from Haifa during the Nakba in 1948. During the chaos of their displacement, they are separated from their five-month-old son Khaldoun and forced out of the city without him.

Almost twenty years later, following the 1967 war, they are finally able to visit Haifa again. They return to their former home hoping to learn what became of Khaldoun. Instead they meet Miriam, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who moved into the house with her husband after Saeed and Safiyya were displaced.

Miriam and her husband had found Khaldoun and adopted him. He is now Dov, has grown up Israeli and has joined the Israeli military. The couple’s attempt to recover something from their former life therefore becomes an encounter between two families whose histories have become bound together by the same house. (palestinefilminstitute.org⁠)

From there, the film wrestles with questions that resist simple answers. What constitutes parenthood after two decades apart? What happens to ownership and belonging when another family has occupied a home for a generation? And what can “return” mean when neither the place nor the people returning to it are as they once were?

The production is also significant within Palestinian film history. Return to Haifa has been described as the first feature-length Palestinian fiction film. Hawal himself was Iraqi, but had worked on films with the PLO, and Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon played an extensive role in the production. Thousands of Palestinian refugees reportedly appeared as extras in the recreation of the 1948 exodus, while clothing, vehicles and other material were gathered from the surrounding communities. (anthologyfilmarchives.org⁠)

Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of Palestinian revolutionary cinema, They Do Not Exist was filmed in and around Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon during the 1970s.

The film combines scenes of everyday life in the Nabatiyeh refugee camp with footage of Israeli bombardment, political speeches, music and fedayeen training. Its title is a direct response to Golda Meir’s 1969 statement denying the existence of a Palestinian people. (Palestine Cinema⁠)