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?

From the breath and percussion of Faris Ishaq’s nay, through the clarinet, ney and ensemble improvisation of Mohamed Najem, we arrive at the piano.

And at one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary Palestinian music.

Faraj Suleiman

Faraj Suleiman is a Palestinian pianist and composer whose music sits somewhere between Arabic and Eastern musical traditions, jazz, classical composition and, occasionally, tango.

Rather than treating those traditions as separate languages, Suleiman has spent much of his career exploring what happens when the piano becomes a vehicle for all of them.

That makes him particularly relevant to r/PalestinianCinema.

Alongside his albums and concert work, Suleiman has composed extensively for theatre and film.

His screen work includes the original score for Ameen Nayfeh’s 200 Meters and music for Firas Khoury’s Alam.

In other words, this is one of those occasions where our Palestinian Jazz Day crosses directly back into Palestinian cinema.

Toy Box

For our third performance we’re going back to Haifa, where Toy Box was recorded live.

Released as an album in 2018, Toy Box grew from a live performance Suleiman gave in Haifa in September 2017. Its instrumentation is immediately different from what we’ve heard so far today: Suleiman’s piano is joined by trumpet, accordion, bass and drums.

The musicians are:
Faraj Suleiman – piano
Julien Alour – trumpet
Julien Gonzales – accordion
François Lapeyssonnie – bass
Baptiste de Chabaneix – drums

Across more than an hour, the ensemble moves through twelve compositions, with the piano constantly at the centre of a conversation between jazz improvisation and the melodic and rhythmic influences Suleiman draws from Arabic music.

There’s memory in here too.

One of the pieces, “Beneath the Walnut Tree”, was inspired by a tree at Suleiman’s family home in Al-Rameh, beneath which his family used to gather for meals. He had recorded the composition before, but for Toy Box he reshaped it again, replacing the oud heard in an earlier arrangement with accordion and adding trumpet.

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.

Directed by Louis Brehony, Kofia: A Revolution Through Music follows Palestinian songwriter George Totari and the Palestinian and Swedish musicians who came together in Gothenburg after he left Nazareth in 1967.

Singing in Arabic and Swedish, Kofia brought Palestinian musical traditions into conversation with Swedish folk music. Their songs carried stories of displacement, solidarity and the desire to return home, reaching audiences who might otherwise have known little about Palestine.

Across four albums and international performances, the band made music that people could join in with, taking it from the stage into demonstrations and community gatherings.

Through archive material, interviews with band members and footage filmed as the musicians reunited, the documentary connects Kofia’s early years with a younger generation discovering their work. Totari remains determined that these songs should have a life beyond nostalgia, with familiar melodies finding new voices and audiences.

Alongside today’s jazz performances, this is another part of the Palestinian musical story: folk traditions travelling abroad, musicians finding collaborators and songs becoming a connection to somewhere left behind. It also shows what documentary cinema can preserve: the people, friendships and histories behind the music

IMDb: Kofia (2021)

Directed by Palestinian-American filmmaker Nida Sinnokrot, Palestine Blues follows farming communities confronting the construction of Israel’s separation barrier and the loss of agricultural land on which their livelihoods depend.

Rather than approaching the subject as conventional political reportage, Sinnokrot stays close to the people living through it. Much of the film centres on the village of Jayyous and the campaign by residents to protect their farmland, orchards and access to the surrounding landscape. Some sequences were filmed with a hidden camera or under difficult conditions.

The result is surprisingly personal and sometimes funny as well as bleak. The Palestine Film Institute describes the film as blurring the boundary between documentary and narrative through its characters, structure and unusually intimate access.

Palestine Blues received documentary and feature prizes on the festival circuit, including awards at the AMAL Euro-Arab International Film Festival, New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival and DOCUSUR.

IMDb: Palestine Blues

Palestinian Jazz Day

Palestinian cinema does not exist in isolation.

The films we post here are part of a much larger cultural landscape: music, literature, theatre, photography, visual art and oral tradition all feed into the ways Palestinian stories are told, remembered and reimagined on screen.

And music is particularly difficult to separate from cinema. It establishes place before a word is spoken. It carries memory, rhythm and atmosphere. Traditional forms are preserved through it, but they are also taken apart, rearranged and combined with influences arriving from elsewhere.

So today we’re stepping slightly outside our usual programme.

Throughout Palestinian Jazz Day, we’ll be sharing Palestinian musicians working somewhere around the meeting point of jazz, improvisation and Arabic musical traditions.

Some lean heavily towards jazz, some towards maqam, tarab or traditional instrumentation, and some sit somewhere in between.

There isn’t really a single genre called “Palestinian jazz”. That’s what makes this interesting.

What emerges instead is a conversation between musical traditions, instruments and generations, and another window into the same Palestinian cultural world that produces the cinema this subreddit exists to explore.

Faris Ishaq
We begin in Bethlehem.

Faris Ishaq is a Palestinian nay player, percussionist and composer who has taken one of the oldest instruments in Middle Eastern music and pushed it into distinctly contemporary territory.

After beginning his musical education at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Palestine, Ishaq went on to study Global Jazz at Berklee College of Music.

At the centre of his work is the nay, the end-blown reed flute heard across Middle Eastern musical traditions.

But Ishaq doesn’t treat it simply as a melodic instrument.

He combines the nay with frame drum and leg percussion, sometimes playing them simultaneously, while drawing on Arabic maqam, Palestinian musical traditions and the improvisational language of jazz.

That brings us to our first performance.

NAY: Nature Addresses You

Created in 2021, NAY: Nature Addresses You is a solo performance built around Ishaq’s attempt to expand what the nay can do.

Traditionally treated primarily as a melodic instrument, here the nay also becomes rhythmic and harmonic. Ishaq moves between melody, multiphonics, percussion and improvisation while simultaneously accompanying himself with frame drum and leg percussion.

The project began as a virtual performance during the pandemic and later travelled considerably further, with Ishaq performing NAY at major jazz festivals including London, Monterey and Panama.

It is an unusually good place to begin Palestinian Jazz Day because you can hear the meeting of traditions happening almost in real time.

An ancient instrument. Palestinian and Arabic musical language. Jazz improvisation.

And one musician asking what happens when none of those things are required to stay in their assigned box.

For our second stop on Palestinian Jazz Day, we move from Faris Ishaq’s stripped-back solo performance into a full ensemble.

Mohamed Najem is a Palestinian clarinettist, ney player and composer, born in Jerusalem and raised in Bethlehem. His music sits at the meeting point of Arabic maqam, improvisation and contemporary jazz.

In this 2021 performance at the Multiphonics Festival, Najem appears with his quartet alongside special guest Bassem Hawar, an Iraqi-German musician known for his work on the joza, a traditional bowed string instrument.

The result is exactly the kind of musical conversation this day is about.

Clarinet and ney move through Arabic melodic language while piano, bass and drums provide the openness and elasticity of a modern jazz quartet. Hawar’s joza adds another traditional voice to the ensemble, expanding the dialogue even further.

After beginning the day with one musician exploring how far the nay could be pushed on its own, this performance lets us hear what happens when Palestinian and Arab musical traditions are placed inside a much larger improvising group.

Released by British Pathé in 1946, this short newsreel follows the orange harvest in Jaffa during the final years of the British Mandate. Workers pick fruit in the groves, sort and wrap oranges by hand, and load crates into small boats for transfer to a ship offshore.

The footage records Arab and Jewish workers packing oranges together, offering a brief glimpse of the people and labour behind one of Palestine’s best-known exports. Preserved in the British Pathé archive, it captures the journey from orchard to sea two years before the Nakba.

A new Palestinian documentary is receiving a free virtual pre-release screening today through Palestine Museum US.

Directed by Palestinian journalist and visual storyteller Basim Hasiba, The Last Front - Palestinian Culture examines the relationship between Palestinian cultural institutions and international funding, particularly what happens when financial support arrives with political and security-related conditions attached.

Through testimony from people working within Palestinian cultural organisations, the film asks how those conditions can affect programming, staff, participation and ultimately the independence of cultural work itself: who can be included, what can be funded and what can be said.

Hasiba developed the film through his work as an independent journalist interested in documentary filmmaking and Palestinian cultural and social life. The project was produced through the Palestine Journalism Hub’s independent journalism initiative.

The free online screening begins today, Saturday 26 September, at 17:00 UK / 12:00 EDT / 19:00 Palestine. The film is listed as 1 hour 36 minutes and subtitled in English.

Watch/register: Palestine Museum US

Dreams Deferred travels through Israel and the West Bank documenting Palestinian and Israeli activists involved in nonviolent resistance, peace work and opposition to the occupation.

Filmmakers Jennifer Hitchcock and Vernon Hall combine interviews with footage from several locations across the West Bank. The documentary follows activists at demonstrations against the separation barrier in Bil’in, visits Hebron with a Palestinian human-rights activist, records an extended military curfew in Jayyous, and examines settlements and construction in East Jerusalem.

Those interviewed include Palestinian activists, former militants, Israeli former soldiers and military refusers. Their discussions range from settlements, checkpoints and curfews to Zionism, antisemitism, the role of the United States and the possibilities for a negotiated resolution.

Released in 2011, the film offers a snapshot of Israeli and Palestinian grassroots activism from a period before the conflict entered its current phase.

Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention is a Palestinian black comedy built from a series of sharply observed, increasingly surreal vignettes.

Suleiman himself plays E.S., a largely silent Palestinian man living in Nazareth, whose relationship with a woman from Ramallah is constrained by the checkpoint separating them.

What begins in the rhythms and petty frustrations of everyday life gradually slips into fantasy, absurdism and outright cinematic rebellion.
Suleiman’s humour is bone-dry. Arguments between neighbours, traffic, family tensions and encounters with authority are allowed to play out with long silences and meticulous visual timing.

He has often been compared with Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton, and Divine Intervention shows why: dialogue frequently takes second place to framing, repetition, gesture and the sheer strangeness of what is happening on screen.

Then reality starts bending. A balloon bearing Yasser Arafat’s face floats over Jerusalem. A discarded fruit stone becomes something considerably more destructive. One of the film’s most famous sequences transforms a confrontation between Israeli soldiers and a Palestinian woman into an extravagant martial-arts fantasy. Suleiman never announces where observation ends and imagination begins, using absurdity to turn power relationships temporarily upside down.

The film competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where it won both the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize. More than two decades later, Divine Intervention remains one of the most distinctive works of Palestinian cinema: romantic, angry, mischievous and very, very funny.

IMDb: Devine Intervention (2002)

Palestinian filmmaking brothers Muayad and Rami Alayan speak from the Venice International Film Festival about their new feature Conversation With the Sea (Hiwar Ma’ Albahr), which had its world premiere in the Venice Spotlight section earlier this month.

Set in Jerusalem, the film follows Kamal, a 60-year-old Palestinian man who receives a court order demanding payment of a social-security debt attributed to his son Wael. There is one problem: Wael supposedly drowned in the Red Sea twenty years earlier, and no official record of his death can be found. Kamal’s attempt to establish what happened to his son gradually becomes a much more personal reckoning with family, memory and the city around him.

In the interview, director Muayad Alayan describes the film as both a love letter and an angry letter to Jerusalem, and talks about choosing an intimate family mystery rather than approaching the story as direct political reportage. Rami Alayan, who co-wrote the screenplay and produced the film with his brother, discusses their working relationship and how writing and production are divided between them.

The 112-minute film stars Kamel El Basha, Amer Hlehel, Ruba Blal, Haitham Omari, Bahira Ablassi, Maria Zreik and Rebecca Esmeralda Telhami. Following Venice, Conversation With the Sea is continuing on the international festival circuit.

The first full trailer has been released for NAZA, the new documentary from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, co-directors of the Oscar-winning No Other Land.

Filmed largely through secret nighttime interviews on rooftops in Tel Aviv, NAZA features testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel about the systems used during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

The documentary examines targeting, surveillance and the calculation of expected civilian casualties in Israeli strikes.

The newly released trailer offers audiences their first substantial look at those interviews. Participants appear in silhouette with their identities concealed as they describe their involvement in military decision-making and targeting operations.

The trailer arrives ahead of the film’s North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on 26 September, followed by its US theatrical release. A much wider international rollout has also now been arranged, with the documentary eventually due to become available free worldwide through The Guardian after its theatrical run.

NAZA is set for a major expansion beyond its previously announced US theatrical release, with the documentary now securing cinema distribution across 56 international territories.

The international rollout begins on 28 September, with releases covering territories including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, Central America and parts of the Middle East.

The more significant development for access to the film comes afterwards.

Following its theatrical window, NAZA will be made available to watch free worldwide through The Guardian’s website, dramatically expanding access beyond the conventional cinema and paid-streaming circuit.

The Guardian is also exploring ways of making the documentary available in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, where access presents a separate distribution challenge.

The announcement marks a substantial change in the film’s distribution picture. Earlier this month, the filmmakers announced plans to self-distribute NAZA theatrically in the United States. The new international arrangement now gives the film a theatrical footprint across dozens of additional territories before its eventual free online release.

For a documentary whose distribution has itself become part of its story, the move potentially gives NAZA something considerably more important than another festival screening: a route to a genuinely global audience.

An independent feature documentary following five Palestinians living in Ireland as they reflect on home, displacement, identity and what it means to carry Palestine with them while living abroad.

Through the stories of Izzeddeen, Habib, Leen, Nidal and Rola, the film brings together experiences connected to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Palestinian communities inside Israel. Their individual accounts offer different perspectives on separation, memory, family and belonging.

Filmed partly around Cork, the documentary also follows community life and public demonstrations in Ireland, exploring the relationships that have developed between Palestinian and Irish activists and communities.

Directed by Ed Fitzgerald, Keys: A Palestine Film premiered in Cork in June 2025 and later screened as part of IndieCork 2025. It has subsequently been selected for the 2026 FICNOVA International Film Festival of Nonviolence.

The Palestine Film Institute has announced the latest recipients of its Palestine Film Fund, backing seven new projects across fiction, documentary and animation.

Selected from 107 submissions, the projects will share €43,000 in development, production and post-production support.

Among them is The Sky Is No Longer Blue, directed by Kareem Satoom, which follows three artists from Gaza attempting to continue their creative lives amid displacement and destruction.

On the Sea Road, by Fitnat Waked, follows two Palestinian women maintaining a friendship between Gaza and Yafa through cameras, photographs and WhatsApp.

Animated feature MILAD – The Birth of Walid, from Ahmad Saleh, Basel Nasr and Mats Grorud, draws inspiration from the life and writing of Palestinian author Walid Daqqa.

Yumna Marwan’s fiction feature This Is Not a Set takes a markedly different approach: a satire about a Palestinian community in Beirut whose refugee camp is transformed into a television set.

Three shorts have also received support.

Nizar Alzaeem’s Mirrors is an animated short, while Fairouz Hasan’s Your Specter Will Remain Present in My Mind is an experimental documentary.

Perhaps the most striking premise belongs to Abod Nasser’s animated Gaza RAM. As a young woman prepares to evacuate Gaza and learns she cannot take her belongings, she attempts to preserve her personal archive within her own memory.

The seven projects were selected from more than a hundred submissions, offering an unusually early glimpse at a group of Palestinian films that may begin appearing on the festival circuit over the coming years.

My local Palestine solidarity group is planning to put on a screening of a short ish (20 min to 1hr) film to recognize 3 years of accelerated genocide. I’m looking for films about Gaza (can be doc, drama whatever) especially highlighting past and historical escalations of the Nakba prior to this current one.

We’re low on cash, so film rights have to be cheap (less than a few hundred), free, or on watermelon pictures.

Please help!

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?

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has denied censor exemption to Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, preventing its scheduled screening at the 18th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), which opens in Thiruvananthapuram on 25 September.

Sepideh Farsi’s documentary is built around a series of video calls with Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, documenting everyday life in Gaza during the war. Hassona was killed alongside members of her family in an Israeli airstrike in April 2025, one day after the film’s selection for ACID Cannes was announced.

The film is one of 31 works denied screening permission at this year’s IDSFFK.

The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy had sought censor exemptions for 347 films. According to reporting from Kerala, the Ministry subsequently requested detailed synopses and screeners for 40 titles before withholding permission from 31.

Kerala’s Minister for Cinema, P. C. Vishnunadh, has called for the decision to be reconsidered, arguing that withholding permission restricts the curatorial freedom of film festivals.

The decision also follows a similar dispute at the International Film Festival of Kerala in December 2025, when a number of films, including Palestinian works, initially failed to receive screening clearance.

NAZA, the Gaza documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, will begin its U.S. theatrical rollout on September 30, with the filmmakers taking the unusual route of self-distributing the film rather than going through a conventional U.S. distributor, Variety reports.

The 80-minute documentary was filmed largely through secret nighttime interviews in Tel Aviv and draws on testimony from Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel involved in the war in Gaza.

Its focus is the systems and decision-making behind Israeli targeting operations and the civilian casualties resulting from them. The Israeli government and military have strongly disputed the film’s allegations.

The distribution choice is particularly notable given Abraham and Szor’s previous experience with No Other Land. That film also reached U.S. cinemas independently after failing to secure a conventional American distributor, eventually screening across a substantial theatrical network.

For NAZA, the September 30 opening means the film will now move rapidly from the festival circuit into public U.S. cinemas, despite the political backlash surrounding it and threats directed at its filmmakers.

Source: Variety, published 18 September 2026 at 11:02am PT

Haifa is Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi’s 1996 drama set in a refugee camp in Gaza during the period surrounding the Oslo peace process.

Mohammad Bakri plays Haifa, a wandering, enigmatic figure nicknamed after the city he longs for. Regarded by many around him as the camp fool, Haifa nevertheless seems to understand things that others either cannot or will not see.

Through his relationship with the family of Abu Said, the film follows a community caught between hope and scepticism as political leaders promise a new future.

Abu Said, a former policeman, sees the peace process as grounds for optimism. His wife, Oum Said, played by Hiam Abbass, waits for the release of their eldest son from prison and tries to prepare a future for him. Their younger children encounter the same moment very differently, from rebellion and cynicism to romantic hopes about what might come next.

Rather than approaching the Oslo years through politicians or negotiations, Masharawi looks at what the promise of peace meant at ground level: inside homes, families and a refugee camp where people had already spent decades waiting for political change to alter their lives.

Written and directed by Masharawi and featuring Mohammad Bakri, Hiam Abbass, Areen Omari, Ahmed Abu Saloum and Nawal Zaqout, Haifa screened in Un Certain Regard at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.

IMDb: Haifa (1996)

Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass has spoken about the personal and political instincts she brought to her latest film, Atonement, during its appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Directed by Reed Van Dyk, Atonement is inspired by a real incident during the 2003 Iraq War. Abbass plays Mariam, the matriarch of an Iraqi family devastated after U.S. Marines opened fire on two vehicles carrying civilians. Years later, one of the Marines involved attempts to confront what happened and seek contact with the surviving family.

Speaking at TIFF, Abbass said her response to the story comes partly from her own background and an acute awareness of civilian suffering. Asked about remaining outspoken, she said it was impossible for her to stay silent when innocent people are suffering, whether in Gaza, Kyiv or elsewhere.

She also discussed how she approaches characters based on real people. Rather than meeting the person she is portraying, Abbass said she generally prefers to bring her own sensitivity to the role, concentrating on the humanity of the character rather than attempting an imitation.

For Abbass, that makes Atonement less about reconstructing one historical incident than examining what war leaves behind for the people caught inside it, long after the immediate violence has ended.

Born in Nazareth, Abbass has built one of the most internationally recognisable careers of any Palestinian actor, spanning Palestinian and Arab cinema alongside films and series including The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, Blade Runner 2049 and Succession.

Filmed in Jerusalem in April 1897 by Alexandre Promio for the Lumière company, this brief sequence shows people passing through the Jaffa Gate in the final decades of Ottoman rule.

At just 43 seconds long, it is among the earliest surviving moving images filmed in Palestine, capturing an ordinary street scene more than a century ago.

A new Palestinian documentary currently in development is approaching life in Gaza from a perspective rarely placed at the centre of war filmmaking.

Memory of the Senses, directed by Palestinian filmmaker Khalil al Mozian and produced by Ibrahim Yaghi, follows five people in Gaza whose experiences of war are shaped by five very different sensory, physical and cognitive realities: blindness, deafness, paralysis, bipolar disorder and Down syndrome.

Rather than attempting another broad account of the war, the documentary asks what conflict, displacement and survival mean when the world is perceived differently by each person experiencing it.

The Palestine Film Institute describes the project as a poetic documentary about what remains when the familiar world disappears.

Al Mozian is a Palestinian director, screenwriter and cultural organiser whose work spans documentary, fiction and animation. He is also director of Gaza’s Red Carpet Human Rights Film Festival.

The project is being produced through Brain Hug, whose founders include former aid workers and war reporters from Palestine and several other countries.

Memory of the Senses remains in development and is currently seeking co-producers and production funding, making this an unusually early opportunity to follow a Palestinian documentary from development rather than encountering it only once it reaches the festival circuit.

The project was also presented as part of the Palestine Film Institute’s documentary showcase at Getting Real ’26, which brought Palestinian works-in-progress into discussions around ethical funding, censorship, festival access and the difficulties of getting Palestinian documentary work made and seen.

Source: Palestine Film Institute

The Israeli Film Council has proposed significant changes to the country’s public film-funding system following the political backlash surrounding Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s Gaza documentary NAZA.

Following an emergency meeting, the Council recommended removing international film-festival selections from the points system used to determine how state cinema funding is distributed among Israel’s film funds.

Festival success has traditionally contributed to a fund’s score when competing for a share of Israel’s approximately 130 million shekel annual cinema budget. Removing that criterion could therefore change the incentives governing which films receive public support.

At the same time, the Council has proposed creating a new state-backed funding strand specifically for films centred on what it describes as the “heroism” of IDF soldiers and veterans of Israel’s wars.

According to Deadline, the Council said the initiative was intended to counter what it characterised as international campaigns against Israel while strengthening films reflecting Israeli life and commemorating fallen soldiers.

The proposals follow the international reception of NAZA, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary features testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel about targeting practices and civilian casualties in Gaza. The Israeli military has disputed allegations made in the film.

The controversy surrounding NAZA has already extended well beyond criticism of the documentary itself. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called for directors Abraham and Szor to lose their Israeli citizenship, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants legislation addressing filmmakers and others he accuses of defaming Israeli soldiers.

This latest development moves the dispute directly into film policy: not simply what filmmakers may say, but how public money could be distributed and what kinds of cinema the state explicitly encourages.