With Hasan in Gaza [2025]

 In 1989, during the 1^st Intifada, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari – a teenager then – had befriended a fearless fellow inmate called Abdel Rahim upon being imprisoned. Twelve years later, during the 2^nd Intifada, Aljafari – he’d emigrated to Berlin by then and was still 2 years away from his debut short – returned to Gaza with a MiniDV camcorder and a guide named Hasan by his side, whose whereabouts remain unknown, in search of his lost friend. It would be another over two decades, as a ghastly genocide is being carried out with brazen impunity, that Aljafari – now with 5 feature-length films under his belt – recovered and strung together the found footage from 3 MiniDV tapes on roads, the sea, locales, people, destroyed homes and chance encounters, thereby providing a haunting and achingly intimate meditation on memory, oppression, loss, personal resistance, collective defiance, and the heartbreaking meaning of home for a Palestinian. Interspersed with lyrical Arab songs, the restrained images – of living under oppression, apartheid, surveillance, and daily violence – foreshadowed the devastation being wreaked upon Gaza. Recalling Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi’s magnificent docu essay Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Israel-Palestine, this quietly melancholic road movie – bursting with understated vitality – captured a man enjoying his freedom after 8 years in jail; women on the edge due to incessant shelling; a wary young guy at a loss at the wanton destruction of homes; being warned of the risks of his camera getting mistaken for a gun by an overzealous military; people playing cards and enjoying family gatherings amidst the occupation; sights of a ravaged landscape from the car; and, most unforgettably, the infectious excitement among kids whenever they notice the friendly camera.

Director: Kamal Aljafari

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Road Movie

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk [2025]

Mobile phones have made the world appear smaller than it actually is while also underlining the massive distances separating us; this remarkable film – a disillusioning tableau of a broken world, yet radiating with profound empathy and camaraderie – indelibly demonstrated this dichotomy. Iranian documentary filmmaker and activist Sepideh Farsi, living in exile in Paris since fleeing Tehran in 1984, and Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, locked in Gaza City, were able to interact for a year and form a deep bond through video calls, allowing us to get a first-hand account of the horrors and the resilience, despite all three – Farsi, Fatima, and us – fundamentally unable to bridge the irreconcilable chasms, barrier and borders. The devastating state-backed genocide in Palestine has killed 250+ journalists, and Fatima’s death – a targeted missile, just as this docu was selected for screening at Cannes, wiped out her entire family to stop her from recording, archiving and bearing witness using her camera – would’ve been just another count on paper if not for this personal memorial and remembrance. Their seeming differences notwithstanding – Farsi is older, left-wing, atheist, feminist, cynical, was once a political prisoner, and now able to roam the world; Fatima was in her mid-20s, devout, filled with irrepressible hope despite the despair surrounding her, never able to explore her dreams and aspirations, and forever a doomed refugee in her own land – the two women engaged in candid conversations through patchy mobile networks, blockade and bombings. Two facets made this a particularly stirring and expansive ode to courage and resistance – Fatima’s contagious smile, in defiance of the deaths, food shortage and loss of loved ones; and her terrific street photographs that Farsi displayed at regular intervals. 

Director: Sepideh Farsi

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Epistolary Film/War

Language: English/Arabic

Country: Palestine/France

The Encampments [2025]

 There’s something magical about documentaries that capture, with rousing political urgency and here-and-now, the collective resistance by civilians who’ve taken to the streets to protest against a boorish establishment. The electrifying co-directed docu The Encampments, simultaneously observational and immersive, belongs to that breed where the throbbing crowd – in this case progressive, defiant and courageous college students – is its protagonist, as they decide to go about being on the right side of the history with daring abandon. The agitprop filmmaking, blending on-ground reportage with political activism, chronicled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that the Columbia University’s students set up in April 2024, demanding complete financial divestiture by the institute’s complicit management from companies enabling Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza, and amnesty for students censured by it. Their stirring pro-Palestine dissent and speaking of truth to power in the face of ugly vilification and repression by politicians and the media spread like a contagious wildfire across university campuses in the US and beyond, and – in parallel – eloquently recalled how, during the 1960s, Columbia’s students had similarly defended that era’s civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War against similarly heavy-handed authorities. The organic and decentralized movement, whose lead spokespersons were Mahmoud Khalil and Sueda Polat (among others), witnessed student and alumni participation that cut across religious, ethnic and national backgrounds, and their intoxicating passion and resilience were paralleled with gut-wrenching footage from Gaza and shocking brutality by NYC cops inside the campus. In perhaps the film’s most enduring moment, the students briefly occupy Hamilton Hall and rename it Hind Hall, in honour of the martyred seven-year-old girl whose harrowing story was memorialized by Kaouther Ben Hania in The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Directors: Michael T. Workman & Kei Pritsker

Genre: Documentary/Political Reportage

Language: English

Country: US/Palestine

Once Upon a Time in Gaza [2025]

 Directed by Nasser Brothers – identical Palestinian twins Tarzan and Arab – Once Upon A Time in Gaza is what the seemingly hackneyed title suggests, viz. a wacky potpourri of politics and meta-references. It’s made in the veins of a revisionist Western – populated with crooked characters, crumbling moralities, wry ironies, stylized dynamics, grimy landscapes and random violence – and set in the titular city which has been under a draconian siege for decades. It’s particularly shaped by the brothers’ intent in capturing life – with its idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and arbitrariness – beyond the blockade, apartheid and genocide that informed its backdrop, and strongly recalled the great Elia Suleiman’s films. Divided into two disparate halves, the first was led by Osama (Majd Eid), a gregarious and amoral hustler who runs a small falafel outlet and peddles in smuggled painkillers on the side; he employs the unassuming Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), and faces a deadly face-off with Abou (Ramzi Maqdisi), a nasty cop wanting a pie of the drug trade. The focus shifts to Yahya in the second half where, traumatized by Osama’s murder by Abou (who’s now grown in power), he’s offered to star as a martyred revolutionary in an agitprop action film sponsored by Gaza’s Ministry of Culture. Though the two halves felt disjointed – sardonic slice-of-life followed by deliberately self-reflexive events – they together carried a free interpretation of the good, the bad and the ugly personas from Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti Western. Majid was captivating, as were the grubby locales, subaltern subtext and deadpan humour. Filmed in Jordan by the exiled brothers, it also featured snippets from the subversive, over-the-top movie-within-movie, and operatically-scored funeral processions that nodded at Kalatozov ‘s magnificent I Am Cuba.

Director: Tarzan & Arab Nasser

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Crime Thriller/Buddy Film/Neo-Western/Action

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

No Other Land [2024]

 State-sponsored brutalities and oppression can manifest in diverse forms, as can defiance and resistance against them. Acts of micro-activism and citizen journalism are eloquent illustrations of the latter, oftentimes taking particularly haunting qualities and power through their rugged authenticity, unfiltered vérité and defiant resolve. This was unforgettably evidenced by the crushing documentary essay 5 Broken Cameras 14 years back, as is by No Other Land that’s directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective spearheaded by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham. Adra, a Palestinian residing in occupied West Bank and life-long activist, has been fearlessly recording the plight of his impoverished fellow villagers – residents of a tiny hamlet called Masafer Yatta – who’ve been facing forced displacement and cruelties, since as long as he can remember, at the hands of the Israeli military who want to ostensibly setup training grounds for the soldiers, and scheming Israeli settlers who then plan to seize the vacated lands for territorial expansion. His tireless documentation of these brazen acts of state-sponsored crimes, including the bulldozing of homes and schools, and violence against protesters, counterpointed the villagers’ refusal to surrender despite the dispossessions, hardships and abject helplessness. His footage – shot over many years leading to the inception of the ongoing genocide in Gaza – speaks truth to power and bears witness with simmering fury and striking urgency. These were, in parallel, coupled with the stirring solidarity that’s established with Abraham, an Israeli journalist who highlights the harrowing injustices in national and international media. The dramatic difference in the situations of these two comrades – in terms of relative rights, freedom and privileges – are vaporized by their shared battles against repression with a remarkable sense of lucidity, equanimity and even humour.

Directors: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic/Hebrew

Country: Palestine

Bye Bye Tiberias [2023]

 French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem’s delicately strung, lyrically shaped and deeply intimate diary film Bye Bye Tiberias, like Karim Aïnouz’s similarly evocative ciné-memoir Mariner of the Mountains, is an eloquently crafted expression of the search for one’s homeland and roots, guided by memories, and driven by the longing for a lost space and time. A journey like this, therefore is as much temporal as it’s spatial, and equally emotional and physical. It’s also a moving expression of female and familial solidarity, through its remembrance of and meditations on four generations of women whose lives have been one of displacement and exile. What emerged through this deceptively intricate assemblage is a layered tapestry informed by the interconnectedness of the personal and the political. Hiam Abbass – professional movie actress, amateur poet and the filmmaker’s mother – had emigrated to France in her 20s to escape and pursue acting. Her daughter’s birth had restored the shaken ties to her family. And now, in her 60s, she agrees to recount their family saga –grandmother Um Ali who, along with her family, was forced to leave their home in Tiberias during the 1948 Nakba; granddad Hosni who died of grief; aunt Hosnieh who’d taken shelter in a refugee camp in Syria and was separated for 30 years; mom Nemat who became a teacher and raised eight kids; her father who loved recording family events on camera; her sisters who’ve lived under the occupation – and take a cathartic trip along with her daughter. This, therefore, was simultaneously a tale of violence, loss and anguish – and, in turn, a bleak reminder of the unabated persecution of the Palestinian people across generations – as one of resilience, resistance and reconciliation.

Director: Lina Soualem

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film

Language: French/Arabic

Country: Palestine

The Palestinians [1975]

 Dutch documentary filmmaker and photographer Johan van der Keuken, as an essay in Jump Cut appropriately observed about him, “works on the margins of the film industry and lets those on the margins of society whose voices are not usually heard speak through his films.” That statement is equally applicable to his stirring docu The Palestinians, which was, in parallel, deeply moving and filled with urgency. In this daring example of radical cinema – one that was so politically progressive that many of his fellow left-wing friends were perturbed by it – he boldly took the side of the forcibly displaced and infinitely persecuted Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, amidst squalor, desperation, despair, anger and incessant violence. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – or, more specifically, the apartheid settler-colonialism of the Israeli occupation and the callous indifference of the Lebanese power structure – thus making them a tragically stateless people. Keuken punctuated the docu-essay with reflections on the industrialized massacre of the Jewish people by European fascism, which ironically segued into occupation, brutality, injustice and dislocation of the Palestinian people. With the context set and his political position clearly established, the guerilla work – shot on location in 1975, with grainy visuals manifesting the best of underground reportage and a startling sense of here-and-now – he trained his lens on individual and collective stories. We see women lamenting the destruction of their homes and the death of their kids; protesters defiantly displaying solidarity on the streets; old men pensively reminiscing their lost homes and lands; rebel fighters training by the day and breaking bread in the evening; and a schoolteacher cogently ensuring the kids know their history of oppression by heart.

Director: Johan van der Keuken

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: Dutch/Arabic

Country: Netherlands/Palestine

Jenin, Jenin [2002]

Jenin, Jenin, as cinema of resistance, was at once powerful, defiant and lucid in how Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammed Bakri used a series of interviews – shorn of peripheral contexts and expositions; disquieting in its recording of blazing emotions; and providing rare agency to the voiceless – to craft a polyphonic memorialization of the oppressed, the dispossessed and the persecuted. The radical treatise, despite its brevity, exhibited a harrowing reminder of repressive settler colonialism being faced by the Palestinian people ever since the occupation, through the devastating crackdown and violence that the impoverished residents of Jenin’s refugee camp – located in West Bank – faced at the hands of Israel’s military during “Operation Defensive Shield” in 2002. It, therefore, emphatically evoked the broader picture through its intense specificity, and, in turn, fiercely chronicled the inseparability of the personal and the political for Palestinians, irrespective of whether they’re rebels, partisans, activists or regular civilians. Bakri’s camera unwaveringly captured the rage, despair and sorrow of the survivors – a broken aged man; a livid grandmother; a bitter middle-aged man; a feisty doctor; a helpless father; a heartbroken mother; a disoriented disabled guy; and an unforgettably furious adolescent girl representing the next generation of resistance – through their testimony of what unfolded. Their stirring refusal to capitulate, even at the face of apartheid and tyranny, powerfully stood out. This therefore served as one of many brutal examples of collective punishment that Palestine have faced in the past, thus making it especially pertinent to the gargantuan monstrosity that’s taking place today. Unsurprisingly, the documentary was censored and banned in Israel, while Bakri faced harassments and became a pariah for his courage and dissidence in challenging the mainstream narrative.

Director: Mohammed Bakri

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

5 Broken Cameras [2011]

 ‘Personal is political’ and ‘political is personal’ were equally and ferociously relevant for the remarkable documentary 5 Broken Cameras’ every minute of runtime, and, in turn, Emad Burnat, the extraordinarily courageous and steadfastly dissident Palestinian man and possessor of what the title so evocatively alluded to. This defiant first-hand chronicle of the daily oppressions and injustices that Israel’s apartheid settler-colonial apparatus perpetrates against Palestine, is centred on the West Bank village of Bil’in where Israelis, through brute military force, have been forcibly occupying farmlands and bulldozing olive groves in order to build walls and settlements, and the fearless collective protests, civil disobedience and opposition that the town’s residents keep putting up despite endless arrests, abuse, violence, extra-judicial despotism and disillusionment. This daring work of political journalism and personal activism, therefore, is the very embodiment of ‘cinema of resistance’. In a fascinating mirroring of Kieslowski’s outstanding work Camera Buff, Emad bought his first camera in 2005 to make home videos on his fourth-born Gibreel, but ended up filming – over the course of the next 6 years – the encroachments, confiscations, destructions and devastations that Bil’in faced, and the valiant stand that they took in response. 5 of his cameras got damaged for different reasons – including a bullet hit that saved Emad’s life – but the footage that they recorded became a testimony to a video camera’s ability to transform into a blazing weapon of dissent. Made in collaboration with progressive Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, it also portrayed his family – in particular his wife of Brazilian descent and Gibreel who grows up amidst this turmoil – and his fellow participants in this struggle, especially two lion-hearted friends who’re always at the forefront of protests.

Directors: Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi

Genre: Documentary/Political Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Activist Reportage

Language: Arabic, Hebrew

Country: Palestine

Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel [2003]

 The 1947 UN Resolution 181 recommended partitioning of Palestine into two unequal halves, with 56% allocated to the Jewish minority and 43% to the Arab majority; this so-called “Green Line”, however, was swiftly abrogated upon the 1948 War – thus further skewing the rights and demographic distribution over time – and ensured that it’d remain just on paper. In 2002, two defiantly leftist and politically conscious émigré filmmakers – Eyal Sivan, an Israeli, and Michel Khleifi, a Palestinian – travelled for two months following this non-existent line from south of Gaza to Galilee in the north – collecting stories, anecdotes, opinions, experiences, memories – which they aptly titled Route 181. The resultant work – powerfully traversing across oral political history, road movie and documentary essay – made for a stirring, evocative, piercing, discomfiting work that beautifully succeeded in being both radically dissident and profoundly melancholic in equal measures. That the film – capturing the distressing perpetuation of setter-colonialism and an apartheid state, which’ve only exacerbated over time – was borne out of collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, thus eloquently subverting the political divides on ground, added an ironic touch to its wryly observant and delicately strung proceedings. Over its 4 ½ hour length divided into three segments, the duo interacted with a dizzyingly diverse group of people – old and young, men and women, soldiers and civilians, oppressors and exploited, bigoted and disillusioned, bellicose and weary – in weaving this complex tapestry. In a tour de force sequence, an aged barber, surrounded by equally aged customers, recounts a harrowing account of ethnic cleansing; this sequence, which mirrored a similar one in Lanzmann’s Shoah, inevitably led to vociferous oppositions by those blinded of the Palestinian plight by their nationalist zealotry.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Eyal Sivan & Michel Khleifi

Genre: Documentary/Road Movie/Political History

Language: Arabic/Hebrew/English

Country: Palestine

The Time That Remains [2009]

 Palestinian auteur Elia Suleiman reached the apotheosis of his craft, voice, persona and formal bravado with his masterful third film The Time That Remains. Its deeply personal stories, with an ambitious historical tapestry as its backdrop, reminded me of Amoz Oz’ unforgettable memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness; its lively, ribald, irreverent, impressionistic evocations had glorious Felliniesque splashes from Amarcord; and these, along with its lacerating political satire, absurdist ironies, deadpan comic tableaux, existential melancholy, minimalist rigour, fierce dissent and heartbreaking reminiscences made it an enthralling work. Distilled from his father’s diaries, mother’s letters and his own memories, Suleiman structured the narrative arc along four timeframes spread across over half a century. It begins in 1948 with the fall of Palestine, leading to exodus, resignations, and ultimately arrest and torture of the resistance, including the dissident Fuad Suleiman. The setting then shifts to the 60s with Fuad leading a mundane life with his wife and 10-year old son Elia amidst neuroses, disillusionment and cultural impositions. The following segment finds Elia as a youth who must escape for subversive involvements while also grappling with his father’s mortality. And finally, in the present, he’s a lonely man who’s returned home from exile, silently observes his aged mother, reconnects with lost friends and witnesses the latest Infitada and stirring uprisings. The pointed political subversions aside, it was filled with hilarious, indelible moments – the Israeli military asking the same questions to Fuad everytime he’s out fishing; an eccentric, suicidal man sharing bawdy ideas for bringing down Israeli occupation; a young Elia reproached by the principal for calling the USA colonialist and imperialist; a tank’s gun barrel following a disinterested Palestinian guy; etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Elia Suleiman

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Film a Clef

Language: Arabic/Hebrew

Country: Palestine

Divine Intervention [2002]

 Elia Suleiman’s second feature film Divine Intervention was as episodic, fragmentary, ironic, deadpan and riotously experimental as Chronicle of a Disappearance; it was also zanier, weirder, more fantastical and provocative, and had a comparatively more definitive central narrative strand too. They, along with his masterful It Must Be Heaven – with their disjointed form; mix of dry existential crisis with “theatre of the absurd”; and the director’s presence as a taciturn, befuddled observer in a world run amok in an endless cycle of uprootedness, oppression and alienation imposed by an intensely apartheid, discriminatory state – made them a unique, tantalizing trilogy. Further, its bold amalgamation of hilarious, surreal and exaggerated sight gags with bleak, discomfiting political overtones reminded me of Kusturica’s signature style. Like the magnificent Michel Khleifi documentary Fertile Memory, this too oscillated between Nazareth, where Suleiman lives, and Ramallah, where an enigmatic and striking Palestinian woman lives; they often meet – to silently spend long romantic moments together – at the military checkpoint manned by pompous Israeli security force. Their aimless love story is counterpointed with tableaux that were poignant, oddball and crazy – the director’s dad, upon becoming gravely ill, is admitted in a hospital where, at nightfall, all patients roam the corridors smoking; cars regularly stop at a café for a fight between the men travelling together; a man surreptitiously throws garbage inside his neighbour’s property every morning; Israeli army hypnotized by a Yasser Arafat balloon; a moment of wild fantasy where the target for shooting practice – representing Palestinian resistance – converts into a ninja-like wonder-woman who eliminates the dazed Israeli death squad, etc. The film’s eclectic soundtrack – comprising of tunes by artists from across the world – was darn irreverent too.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Elia Suleiman

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire

Language: Arabic/Hebrew

Country: Palestine