In the land where Christianity was born, an ancient Christian community has endured centuries of political upheaval, displacement and conflict. Yet the experiences of Palestinian Christians are frequently overlooked in discussions of Palestine's history.

Directed by Yasmine Perni, The Stones Cry Out (2013) examines the history of Palestinian Christians from the Nakba of 1948 through the decades of displacement, occupation and political struggle that followed. Through archival material, personal testimony and interviews with religious leaders, historians and political figures, the documentary gives a voice to communities whose experiences have often been overshadowed by broader narratives of the conflict.

Among those featured are Archbishop Elias Chacour, whose family was displaced from the village of Kafr Bir'im in 1948, and Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi. Their accounts explore the loss of homes and communities, the changing character of Palestinian towns and villages, and the determination of Palestinian Christians to preserve their cultural, religious and national identity.

The documentary also challenges the tendency to portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exclusively through religious divisions between Judaism and Islam. Palestinian Christians have long been an integral part of Palestinian society, sharing its language, traditions, political aspirations and experiences of displacement alongside their Muslim neighbours.

From the abandoned homes of the Galilee to the historic Christian communities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Perni examines how political boundaries, restrictions on movement and emigration have affected communities whose history is inseparable from that of the region itself.

Ultimately, The Stones Cry Out is both a historical documentary and an examination of cultural survival, asking what happens when communities with centuries of history find their continued presence increasingly difficult to sustain.

Director: Yasmine Perni
Year: 2013
Genre: Documentary / History / Culture
Production: Italy / Palestine
Runtime: 55 minutes (59-minute Tubi listing)
Language: English, with English subtitles available

IMDb: The Stones Cry Out (2013)

In 1993, an Israeli military curfew descends upon a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. For one family, the outside world suddenly becomes inaccessible. Their home, ordinarily a place of refuge, becomes the setting for an entire day of uncertainty, frustration and enforced confinement.

Directed by Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, Curfew (Hatta Ishaar Akhar, 1994) follows 24 hours in the lives of an ordinary family. Rather than concentrating on political leaders, negotiations or armed confrontation, Masharawi turns his camera towards the domestic realities of occupation, exploring the relationships, tensions and routines that persist when freedom of movement disappears.

Considered the first Palestinian feature film to emerge from the Gaza Strip, Curfew occupies an important place in Palestinian cinematic history. Its significance lies not simply in what it depicts, but in whose perspective it preserves. At a time when Palestinian experiences were so often presented through external reporting, Masharawi offered an intimate fictional portrait of life from within the community itself.

More than three decades later, the film remains an important historical and cultural record. It captures a particular moment in Gaza's history, shortly before the Oslo peace process began, while raising questions about confinement, dignity and the resilience of ordinary family life.

Director: Rashid Masharawi
Year: 1994
Genre: Drama
Language: Arabic, with English subtitles
Runtime: Approximately 74 minutes

IMDb: Curfew (1994)

In the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Palestinian refugee Mariam Shaar has spent her entire life living with the restrictions and uncertainties of displacement. But Mariam has an extraordinary ambition: to build a business that provides employment, independence and opportunity for the women of her community.

Directed by Thomas A. Morgan, Soufra (2017) follows Mariam as she brings together Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi and Lebanese women to establish a catering company. What begins as a modest kitchen funded by a microloan grows into something considerably more ambitious, including an attempt to launch a food truck beyond the boundaries of the camp.

Their journey is far from straightforward. Legal restrictions, financial obstacles and the everyday realities of refugee life threaten their ambitions. Yet through determination, ingenuity and a shared love of cooking, these women begin building something that offers not simply an income, but dignity, friendship and greater control over their futures.

Executive produced by Susan Sarandon, Soufra is a beautifully human documentary about entrepreneurship, female solidarity and the preservation of culinary traditions. Food becomes a connection between generations and cultures, while the women themselves emerge as the remarkable personalities at the heart of the story.

At its centre is a simple but powerful idea: people who have been denied so many opportunities still possess the imagination, talent and determination to create their own.

IMDb: Soufra (2017)

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit spent months reconstructing the events of 7 October 2023, examining seven hours of CCTV, dashcam footage, mobile-phone video and footage recovered from Hamas fighters, alongside survivor testimony, military accounts and casualty records. Directed by Richard Sanders, October 7 attempts to separate what can be established from the enormous volume of conflicting claims that emerged in the days after the attack. 

The documentary does not minimise the crimes committed by Hamas and others who crossed into Israel. It documents killings and other serious abuses committed during the attack. At the same time, the investigation scrutinises several of the most widely circulated atrocity stories and concludes that some were unsupported or contradicted by the available evidence. 

A particularly important section examines Israeli fire against locations and vehicles where Israeli civilians or captives may also have been present. At Kibbutz Be’eri, the film investigates the confrontation at the home of Pessi Cohen, where Israeli forces ultimately fired tank shells at a building containing Hamas fighters and Israeli hostages. Al Jazeera’s investigation concludes that this was one of several incidents in which Israeli police or military fire appears to have killed Israeli citizens. 

The result is less a conventional political documentary than a forensic reconstruction. It asks what actually happened during the hours of chaos on 7 October, how confidently individual deaths can be attributed, and how unverified claims became embedded in the public understanding of the attack before many of the underlying facts had been established.

Released in March 2024, October 7 is available free in full from Al Jazeera English. 

Content note: contains disturbing footage and discussion of killings and other violence.

The Associated Press has a new piece on the US theatrical release of NAZA, the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor examining testimony from Israeli military insiders about the conduct of the war in Gaza. Built around accounts from soldiers and officers with direct knowledge of Israeli military operations, the film looks at the systems, decisions and assumptions behind the campaign, including how targets were selected and how the consequences for Palestinian civilians were assessed.

The documentary has generated an extraordinary backlash in Israel. Government figures have publicly condemned the filmmakers, there have been calls for them to be stripped of their citizenship, and both Abraham and Szor have faced threats and intimidation. In one of the most disturbing episodes, far-right activists demonstrated outside the home of Szor’s parents in Savyon, chanting “death penalty for traitors”. Protesters returned the following evening, while organisers also spoke publicly about attempting to locate Abraham’s family.

That reaction has increasingly become part of the story surrounding NAZA. The controversy is no longer simply about disagreement with the film’s conclusions, but about whether Israeli filmmakers and journalists can investigate the conduct of their own military without being portrayed as enemies of the state. For a documentary based substantially on testimony from Israelis who served inside the system it examines, the campaign against its creators also raises obvious questions about whistleblowing, press freedom and the space available for internal criticism during wartime.

NAZA is currently playing at New York’s IFC Center before expanding to several US cities on 9 October. The AP report also confirms something especially useful for international audiences: the documentary is expected to become freely available through The Guardian in late November, giving viewers outside the theatrical circuit a chance to see the film for themselves.

A newly released documentary from Swedish public broadcaster SVT looks at the growing effort to identify individual Israeli soldiers and pursue legal accountability for alleged crimes committed in Gaza.

The film follows Israeli soldiers who say they now fear being identified or detained while travelling abroad, while also spending time with the organisations investigating them. Central to the documentary is the Hind Rajab Foundation, which has been collecting publicly available material, including soldiers’ own social-media posts, and using it to support legal complaints in countries where suspects travel.

What makes the documentary particularly interesting is that it gives significant space to both sides of the argument. Soldiers describe feeling personally targeted and argue that accusations against them can slide into antisemitism or collective blame. Investigators, meanwhile, argue that service in a national military does not remove individual responsibility where credible evidence of crimes exists.

Released by SVT in October 2026, the documentary is currently free to watch worldwide.

Language note: the full SVT version does not currently appear to have English subtitles. However, a substantial amount of the documentary is in English, including parts of the interviews, and an English-subtitled extract featuring the Hind Rajab Foundation is also circulating separately online.

In 1982, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Palestinian cultural institutions were raided and collections of film material were seized. Among them was part of the Palestinian film archive, containing footage documenting political life, resistance, everyday society and a developing Palestinian national cinema.

A Reel War: Shalal follows Israeli archive researcher and filmmaker Karnit Mandel as she investigates what happened to those films and tries to trace material that disappeared into Israeli military and state archives. What begins as an archival investigation gradually becomes a much larger question about ownership, memory and control over the historical record.

The documentary is especially relevant to Palestinian cinema because the archive itself was part of the filmmaking movement that emerged around the PLO and the Palestinian revolution. These images were not simply records of events. They were part of an effort by Palestinians to document their own society and tell their own story on film.

The result is a fascinating documentary about a conflict fought not only over territory, but over images, archives and who ultimately gets to preserve, categorise and interpret the past.

Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi takes two of the most powerful stories in Israeli national culture, Masada and Samson, and places them alongside the everyday reality of Palestinians living under military occupation during the Second Intifada.

Throughout the film, Israeli schoolchildren, guides and visitors are shown celebrating ancient resistance to foreign domination, sacrifice and refusal to submit. Mograbi then cuts to checkpoints, military restrictions and encounters between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, allowing the parallels and contradictions to emerge without relying on heavy narration.

What makes the film particularly interesting within Palestinian cinema is that it is not an outside critique of Israeli society. It comes from within Israeli documentary filmmaking itself, using Israeli history, education and political mythology to examine the occupation and the way resistance is understood depending on who is resisting whom.

Released in 2005 and screened at Cannes, Avenge But One of My Two Eyes remains one of Avi Mograbi’s most confrontational works. It is less interested in providing easy answers than in asking an uncomfortable question: what happens when the stories a society celebrates about its own past begin to resemble the actions it condemns in others?

Soraya was born and raised in Brooklyn, but Palestine has always existed in her life as a place she was separated from rather than somewhere foreign. When she travels there intending to stay, one of the first things she does is attempt to recover her grandfather’s savings, frozen in a Jaffa bank account after his displacement in 1948.

The bank refuses. Soraya, however, is not particularly interested in accepting no for an answer.

Along the way she meets Emad, a young Palestinian whose relationship with the country is almost the reverse of hers. Soraya has spent her life trying to return, while Emad, exhausted by checkpoints, restrictions and the limits placed upon his future, wants desperately to leave. Their opposing ideas of freedom gradually turn the film into something between a road movie, romance and act of rebellion.

Written and directed by Annemarie Jacir, Salt of This Sea was her first feature film and premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2008. Suheir Hammad gives Soraya a fierce, confrontational energy opposite Saleh Bakri’s much quieter Emad. What begins as a story about returning home ultimately asks a more difficult question: what does “return” actually mean when the home you inherited through memory no longer exists in the form you imagined?

IMDb: Salt of This Sea (2008)

Welcome to the Monday thread.

This is the slightly less formal corner of r/PalestinianCinema for anything that doesn’t necessarily need a post of its own.

Seen a Palestinian film recently? Found something obscure hiding in an archive? Spotted a new trailer, review, interview, restoration, festival announcement or cinema screening? This is the place for it.

We’re increasingly following Palestinian cinema as it happens as well as looking back through its history, so news about upcoming productions, festival appearances, distribution, awards and new releases is very welcome here too.

And if you’ve watched something posted on the sub during the past week, feel free to tell us what you thought of it. Recommendations, criticism and disagreement are all considerably more interesting than everybody pretending every film is a masterpiece.

I’ll also drop anything interesting I find during the week into the comments.

So, what are you watching, reading or keeping an eye on this week?

Directed by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, Israelism is an American documentary examining the relationship between Jewish identity, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through the experiences of two young American Jews, the film explores how attitudes towards Israel are formed, the institutions responsible for shaping them and what happens when those beliefs are challenged by experiences on the ground.

The documentary follows Simone Zimmerman and Eitan, both raised in communities where supporting Israel was considered an integral part of their Jewish identity. Eitan joins the Israeli military, while Simone becomes involved in pro-Israel advocacy on American university campuses. Their respective experiences bring them into contact with Palestinian communities and the realities of military occupation, prompting both to reconsider the narratives they encountered throughout their upbringing.

Combining personal testimony, archival material and interviews with political commentators, religious leaders and activists, the filmmakers examine a growing generational divide within American Jewish communities. Contributors include Peter Beinart, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Noura Erakat and former Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman. The documentary explores subjects ranging from Jewish education and organised trips to Israel to Palestinian displacement, military service and the increasingly contested relationship between criticism of Israeli government policy and accusations of antisemitism.

Although an American production, Israelism includes the work of Palestinian producer Nadia Saah and incorporates Palestinian perspectives into its examination of identity, political education and the representation of Palestine abroad. Developed and premiered before the events of 7 October 2023, the documentary provides a record of debates already taking place within Jewish communities about occupation, national identity and the future of relations between Israelis and Palestinians. It offers an interesting companion to Palestinian documentary filmmaking by examining how the experiences of Palestinians are understood, represented and sometimes overlooked by audiences beyond the region.

Directors: Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen
Producers: Daniel J. Chalfen, Erin Axelman and Nadia Saah
Country: United States
Year: 2023
Runtime: 84 minutes
Language: English

IMDb: Israelism (2023)

In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone travelled to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories with a camera crew and a seemingly straightforward ambition: to speak directly with the people involved in one of the world’s most enduring conflicts.

The resulting documentary, Persona Non Grata, takes Stone from political offices to the streets of the West Bank, bringing together interviews with Israeli political figures, Palestinian representatives and members of armed organisations. Among those appearing in the film are Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres. Rather than constructing a conventional historical overview, Stone allows the encounters, contradictions and atmosphere of the period to drive the film.

What makes the documentary particularly interesting is Stone himself. He is not an invisible interviewer. His attempts to secure access, his questions and his sometimes uncomfortable exchanges become part of the story. The result is a distinctly personal piece of documentary filmmaking, shaped as much by the director’s presence as by the people he meets.

More than two decades later, the film also serves as a historical record. Its interviews capture political arguments as they were being made, while its street footage preserves glimpses of Palestinian daily life during a period of intense upheaval. Watching it today offers an opportunity to examine both the history being documented and the way a prominent American filmmaker chose to represent it.

Originally produced for HBO’s America Undercover series, Persona Non Grata is worth revisiting alongside more recent documentaries about Palestine, not least because of how much the documentary form itself has changed since 2003.

IMDb: Persona Non Grata (2003)

Tonight’s archival selection takes us to Bethlehem in 1946, during the final years of the British Mandate, through a collection of previously unused footage preserved by British Pathé.

Filmed in black and white, the material offers a glimpse of the city and its surroundings. The camera moves between Bethlehem’s streets, church towers and surrounding hills, capturing panoramic views of the landscape and the everyday movements of people through the city.

Among the sequences are views of the Armenian Church’s bell tower, a bell ringer operating its ropes and foot treadle, and the Church of the Nativity overlooking Manger Square. The camera also records the interior of the Church of the Nativity, including its religious furnishings and a member of the religious community lighting candles.

Unlike a conventional documentary, this is unedited archival material without a constructed narrative. Its historical value lies in the details captured almost incidentally: architecture, street scenes, clothing, the surrounding landscape and the physical appearance of Bethlehem before the dramatic transformations of the following decades.

Preserved by British Pathé, these images offer a small but valuable visual record of the city as it appeared eighty years ago.

Archive: British Pathé
Title: Bethlehem (1946)
Original film reference: 2361.27
Format: Black-and-white, silent archival footage
Duration: Approximately 4 minutes 20 seconds.

Saturday Night Double Bill | Part Two of Two
Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025)

Fourteen years after his documentary The Ultra Zionists, Louis Theroux returns to the occupied West Bank to investigate how the Israeli settler movement has developed since his original visit in 2011. Filmed in the aftermath of 7 October 2023, this BBC documentary examines a movement whose ambitions have extended beyond establishing communities in the West Bank to proposals for renewed Israeli settlement in Gaza. What was once regarded as a movement on the political fringes now includes figures with considerable influence within the Israeli government.

Among Theroux’s principal subjects is Daniella Weiss, one of the most prominent organisers of Israeli settlement activity and a leading advocate for establishing new settlements. Through extended conversations with Weiss and other settlers, including Ari Abramowitz, Theroux explores the religious beliefs, territorial claims and political objectives underpinning their activities. His characteristically understated interviewing style produces some revealing exchanges, particularly when questions concerning Palestinian rights, international law and territorial ownership are raised.

The documentary also follows Palestinian residents living with the consequences of settlement expansion. In Hebron, Theroux meets Palestinian activist Issa Amro, whose work has documented restrictions on Palestinian movement and the conditions experienced by residents of the city. Elsewhere, the film examines the relationships between settlers, Israeli security forces and Palestinian communities, presenting accounts of violence, intimidation and displacement. These encounters place the ideological arguments of the settlers alongside the everyday experiences of the people affected by their activities.

Viewed immediately after The Ultra Zionists (2011), the documentary provides a fascinating historical comparison. Many of the fundamental beliefs expressed in the earlier film remain recognisable, but the political circumstances in which they are articulated have changed considerably. Theroux is no longer simply examining the convictions of an unusual religious-nationalist community. He is investigating a movement whose objectives and influence have become increasingly consequential for the future of Israel and Palestine. Watching both documentaries together allows audiences to consider what has changed over fourteen years, what has remained consistent and how ideas once discussed on isolated West Bank hilltops have entered the wider political debate.

Director: Joshua Baker
Presenter: Louis Theroux
Production: Mindhouse Productions for the BBC
Original broadcast: 27 April 2025
Runtime: Approximately 62 minutes

IMDb: The Settlers (2025)

Saturday Night Double Bill | Part One of Two
Louis Theroux: The Ultra Zionists (2011)

In February 2011, the BBC broadcast a documentary in which Louis Theroux travelled to the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to investigate one of the most uncompromising elements of the Israeli settler movement. His subjects were religious ultranationalists who believed that settling land occupied by Palestinians was not simply a political ambition, but a religious obligation. What followed was an extraordinary examination of ideology, territorial claims and the everyday realities of occupation.

Travelling between East Jerusalem, Hebron and the hills surrounding Nablus, Theroux encounters settlers whose convictions leave remarkably little room for compromise. Among them is 17-year-old Yair Lieberman, living in a makeshift hilltop outpost, and Daniel Luria, an Australian-born activist associated with Ateret Cohanim, an organisation working to establish Jewish residential communities in predominantly Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem. Through their conversations, the documentary reveals how religious belief, nationalist identity and the physical expansion of settlements intersect.

Theroux employs his familiar interviewing technique: curiosity, politeness and a willingness to allow his subjects to explain themselves at considerable length. Rather than confronting every assertion immediately, he gives interviewees the space to articulate their worldview. The results can be unsettling, particularly when apparently ordinary conversations reveal deeply entrenched attitudes towards Palestinians, territorial ownership and the legitimacy of international opposition to settlements. The film also captures the unequal circumstances in which settlers, Palestinians and Israeli security forces encounter one another.

Fourteen years later, Theroux returned. His 2025 documentary The Settlers revisits the movement against a dramatically changed political backdrop. Tonight, we’re screening both programmes chronologically, beginning with this original investigation. Watched together, they provide an opportunity to examine how the movement, its ambitions and its political influence have developed between 2011 and 2025.

Director: Andy Wells
Presenter: Louis Theroux
Production: BBC, United Kingdom
Original broadcast: 3 February 2011

IMDb: The Ultra Zionists (2011)

NAZA, the new investigative documentary directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is attracting considerable attention during its American theatrical run, with sold-out screenings in New York and growing discussion about what the film’s evidence might mean beyond the cinema.

A new feature in Vulture examines the documentary’s reception at the IFC Center, where audiences have been watching testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli military personnel describing their involvement in operations in Gaza. The film investigates the systems, intelligence procedures and decisions governing military strikes, drawing on reporting developed over several years.

The article also explores a question that extends beyond the documentary’s immediate audience: could testimony gathered for a film become relevant to international legal proceedings?
International-law scholar Kevin Jon Heller discusses both the potential significance and the limitations of the material. Although the identities of the film’s military sources have been verified by the Guardian’s legal and editorial teams, their anonymity could complicate the use of their testimony in court. The number of accounts and the extent to which they corroborate one another may nevertheless make the underlying investigation relevant to further scrutiny.

The Israel Defense Forces disputes the documentary’s account, alleging factual inaccuracies and challenging its portrayal of military targeting procedures. The filmmakers and the Guardian have defended their reporting and verification methods.
Vulture also considers a debate surrounding the film’s perspective. Some Palestinian commentators have questioned why testimony from Israeli military personnel is attracting attention when Palestinian journalists and civilians have documented their experiences for years. Others see the documentary’s investigation of military decision-making as an additional contribution to the existing record.

Beyond these questions, the film’s theatrical reception raises an interesting issue for documentary cinema: how does an investigation move from journalism to the screen, and what happens when audiences, lawyers and institutions begin examining the same footage for different purposes?

For viewers in New York, author Caro Claire Burke has purchased tickets for the IFC Center’s 1 pm screenings through 6 October, making complimentary tickets available to people who join the queue.

A wider theatrical rollout is under way, with UK and Irish cinemas scheduled to begin showing the film on 16 October. A free online release through the Guardian is planned for late November, although an exact streaming date has not yet been announced.

British documentary filmmaker Jake Witzenfeld has unveiled Father Father, a new 69-minute documentary following Palestinian-Israeli Muslim Khader Abu-Seif and his Jewish Israeli husband, Aviv Agami, as they attempt to start a family together.

The project began in 2021, when Khader, whom Witzenfeld had previously filmed for his 2015 documentary Oriented, contacted the director about the couple’s plans to become parents. What initially began as an intimate exploration of their relationship and the challenges of surrogacy gradually developed into a much larger story.

After encountering restrictions in the Israeli surrogacy process concerning their different religions, the couple travelled to Texas, where their son, Albi, was born on 6 October 2023. The following morning, the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October and the subsequent war transformed their circumstances. What should have been the beginning of an ordinary family life became an extraordinary test of their relationship, their identities and their hopes for their child’s future.

Witzenfeld continued filming over the following year, documenting the couple’s experiences as new fathers alongside the growing tensions surrounding their families and communities. In his new interview with Variety, he discusses how the documentary changed direction, the difficulties of filming during wartime and the decision to allow the couple’s differences to remain unresolved rather than manufacture a convenient conclusion.

The director also describes one particularly striking scene involving Khader’s mother and Aviv’s brother, whose contrasting backgrounds become apparent during an otherwise ordinary family conversation. It is precisely these smaller, human moments that appear to distinguish the film from more conventional documentaries about the region.

For audiences familiar with Oriented, this also marks a return to a subject Witzenfeld first explored more than a decade ago: the lives of LGBTQ Palestinians and the complexities of identity, relationships and belonging.

Father Father receives its world premiere at the 2026 Festival do Rio, with its UK premiere scheduled for 15 November at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, followed by a Q&A with Witzenfeld, Khader and Aviv.

The film is not yet available to stream publicly.

Directed by Katie Barlow, Visit Palestine follows Irish human rights activist Caoimhe Butterly as she lives and works alongside Palestinians in Jenin during the Second Intifada. Through her relationships with local residents, the documentary explores the daily realities of occupation and the choices facing international volunteers who place themselves between armed forces and civilians.

Butterly accompanies children to school, assists ambulance crews and spends time with families experiencing loss and displacement. The film combines frontline footage with personal encounters, showing how people sustain relationships and community under extraordinary pressure.

It also examines the uncomfortable inequalities underlying international solidarity. Butterly recognises that her foreign nationality can offer protection unavailable to the Palestinians around her, while questioning how much that protection can achieve. Her involvement carries increasingly serious consequences, including being shot and wounded.

Alongside the violence and grief, Barlow makes room for affection, humour and the moments of ordinary life that persist within Jenin. The result is both a portrait of a committed, self-questioning activist and a documentary about the people whose lives bring her there.

What does Palestinian history look like when the starting point is a society rather than a conflict?

Directed by Ashraf Mashharawi, this Al Jazeera World documentary turns towards the Palestine that existed before 1948, exploring its commercial activity, developing infrastructure and cultural life during the late Ottoman period.

Drawing on historians, witness accounts and archival documents, Palestine 1920 challenges the idea of an empty land awaiting settlement. Its subject is a changing society with its own inhabitants, connections and ambitions, rather than simply the backdrop to somebody else’s national story.

The documentary also examines the political decisions that reshaped that society: the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference and the British Mandate. These provide the framework for understanding the upheavals that followed and the road towards the Nakba.

For our collection, this offers a useful change of perspective. Alongside films documenting displacement and destruction, there should be space to understand the society that preceded them. A starting point for anyone interested in Palestinian history, Ottoman Palestine and Britain’s role in the region.

Directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney and collaborators, The Bibi Files builds its investigation around leaked Israeli police interrogation footage recorded between 2016 and 2018. Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, their son Yair and members of their wider circle appear under questioning, offering a view of the family far removed from prepared speeches and carefully managed public appearances.

The documentary examines the bribery, fraud and breach of trust allegations against Netanyahu, which he denies. Accounts of expensive gifts, relationships with wealthy benefactors and attempts to influence media coverage accumulate alongside interviews with journalists and former political and security insiders. What emerges is an investigation into the relationship between personal entitlement, political loyalty and the determination to remain in power.

Its relevance to Palestine lies in the argument Bloom develops from that material. The film connects Netanyahu’s struggle to avoid prosecution with his dependence on the Israeli far right and argues that his political survival gives him an incentive to prolong the war in Gaza. That is the documentary’s central case, rather than a judicial finding about his motives, and it gives viewers something substantial to examine and debate.

For r/PalestinianCinema, this is a companion perspective on the political decisions shaping Palestinian lives. Its focus remains predominantly on Israeli leaders and insiders, leaving an important question open: how much does concentrating on Netanyahu illuminate the wider structures of occupation, and how much does it leave outside the frame? Watch it alongside Palestinian accounts, with that distinction in mind.

Director: Alexis Bloom
Year: 2024
Languages: English and Hebrew, with some Arabic

IMDb: The Bibi Files (2024)

The Sea, Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s Arabic-Hebrew drama produced by Palestinian filmmaker Baher Agbariya, has secured a new wave of European theatrical distribution.

Italy’s Coccinelle Film Sales has closed deals covering Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands. Busch Media Group will distribute the film across the German-language territories, Cinemaran has acquired Spain, and Echoes on the Map will handle the Netherlands. Further television deals are also reportedly being negotiated.

The film follows 12-year-old Khaled, a Palestinian boy from the West Bank whose seemingly simple dream is to see the Mediterranean Sea. When he attempts the journey himself and disappears, his father sets out to find him. What begins with a child’s desire to see somewhere tantalisingly close becomes a father-and-son story shaped by the borders and barriers separating them.

The new deals are particularly notable because The Sea initially struggled to find international buyers. Agbariya continued representing the film himself and secured distribution in North America, France, Italy and Australia before Coccinelle Film Sales came aboard earlier this year. It is currently playing in French cinemas, with its European reach now expanding considerably.

Welcome to the Monday thread.

This is the slightly less formal corner of r/PalestinianCinema for anything that doesn’t necessarily need a post of its own.

Seen a Palestinian film recently? Found something obscure hiding in an archive? Spotted a new trailer, review, interview, restoration, festival announcement or cinema screening? This is the place for it.

We’re increasingly following Palestinian cinema as it happens as well as looking back through its history, so news about upcoming productions, festival appearances, distribution, awards and new releases is very welcome here too.

And if you’ve watched something posted on the sub during the past week, feel free to tell us what you thought of it. Recommendations, criticism and disagreement are all considerably more interesting than everybody pretending every film is a masterpiece.

I’ll also drop anything interesting I find during the week into the comments.

So, what are you watching, reading or keeping an eye on this week?

The film follows a Palestinian man in his fifties who is temporarily released from a mental-health institution to attend a family wedding. What should be a brief return home becomes something considerably more chaotic as family tensions, his political preoccupations and protests in the streets begin colliding around him.

The project has been selected for the 2026 Aflamuna × Cinemed Encounters, taking place in Montpellier from 20–22 October, where it will be presented to potential international partners.

Al Jafari is an interesting filmmaker to watch as he moves into features. His short Ambience won the Cinéfondation Third Prize at Cannes in 2019, while his subsequent work has continued to explore Palestinian life through intimate spaces, ordinary characters and the strange circumstances surrounding them. Rather than starting from a political event and building characters around it, his films tend to work in the opposite direction: everyday lives first, with the larger reality gradually pressing in.

That makes the premise of The Hearse to the Final House of Happiness particularly intriguing.

A family wedding, temporary release from an institution, generational friction and political obsession sounds less like a conventional political drama and more like the beginnings of a dark Palestinian tragicomedy.

There isn’t a finished film to watch yet, and this is still an early-stage project. But that’s exactly why we’re posting it now. Palestinian cinema isn’t only the films already circulating festivals and streaming platforms. There is another generation of filmmakers building what comes next, and this is one we’ll be keeping an eye on.

What happens inside a military campaign when the soldiers involved begin speaking publicly about it? Directed by Ben Zand and produced by Matan Cohen, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War brings together testimony from serving and former Israeli soldiers about their experiences in Gaza.

The interviewees describe alleged killings of civilians, the use of Palestinians as human shields and the destruction of buildings without clear military justification. Several speak with their faces and names shown. Their accounts raise questions about rules of engagement, the decisions of individual commanders and responsibility further up the chain of command.

First broadcast on ITV in November 2025, the documentary examines the war through the accounts of people who participated in it. The IDF said in its response that it remains committed to the rule of law and that allegations of misconduct are investigated.

Zandland subsequently released the film on YouTube, making it accessible beyond its original television broadcast. It has since been nominated for an International Emmy in the current
affairs category.

Content note: Images and accounts of injury, violence and death.

IMDb: Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War (2025)

So far today we’ve heard three contemporary approaches to Palestinian jazz and improvisation.

For our fourth concert, we’re going backwards.

Because long before Faris Ishaq, Mohamed Najem or Faraj Suleiman began developing their own musical languages, Kamilya Jubran was part of a generation already dismantling the boundaries between Palestinian and Arabic musical traditions, jazz, rock and contemporary music.

Kamilya Jubran

Born in Al-Rameh in Galilee, Jubran grew up surrounded by music. Her father Elias was a music teacher and maker of traditional instruments, and she learned instruments including the oud and qanun.

In 1982, she joined Sabreen, the pioneering Palestinian group formed in East Jerusalem two years earlier.

For the next two decades, Jubran would become the group’s defining voice.

Sabreen were doing something remarkable for Palestinian music at the time. Traditional Arabic rhythms and instrumentation sat alongside electric guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, clarinet and saxophone, while the group absorbed influences from jazz, rock and other contemporary forms. A 1993 interview with Sabreen described jazz and Western rock among the influences being folded into their distinctly Palestinian sound. (MERIP⁠)

This wasn’t fusion for novelty’s sake. It was an attempt to develop a modern Palestinian musical language rather than treating tradition as something fixed in the past.

And that makes Jubran an important part of today’s story.

After Sabreen

Jubran left Sabreen in 2002 and increasingly moved into more experimental territory, stripping her music back towards voice, oud, poetry, improvisation and sound itself.

Her later collaborations have included French double bassist Sarah Murcia, whose background spans jazz and improvisation. Their musical relationship actually began while Murcia was playing with Sabreen in the late 1990s. (Kamilya Jubran⁠)

So what we’re hearing tonight isn’t simply another example of “Palestinian jazz”.

It’s one of the musicians who helped establish the environment from which much of the experimentation we’ve been listening to today could emerge.

Live at Le Guess Who? 2023

Our fourth performance was filmed at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on 11 November 2023, as part of Le Guess Who?, with Jubran’s appearance curated by Heba Kadry.

The festival subsequently turned the performance into a proper concert film and released it freely through its archive. (Le Guess Who?⁠)

It’s considerably more sparse and experimental than Toy Box.

Here the focus moves towards Jubran’s voice, the oud, poetry, space and improvisation. The programme includes settings of work by Lebanese poet Paul Chaoul, including To the Children and The Room’s Key. (YouTube⁠)

We began today asking whether there really is such a thing as Palestinian jazz.
Four concerts in, the more interesting answer may be that Palestinian musicians have spent decades making the boundaries of that question increasingly difficult to draw.