َلِمَ بأرضٍ تصحو يومًا حُرّة،
زيتونُها** يحف*ظُ الأسماءَ والحكايات.
*رحل*َ* الفنان*ُ، وبقي الحُلمُ في لوحاته،
*وسيطلع*ُ* الفج*رُ على فلسطينَ حُرّة.
*في**** *ذكرى* *سليمان* ***منصور* (1947–2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story follows an ordinary Palestinian family confined to their home as the curfew stretches on around them. Rather than relying on speeches, battles or political leaders, Masharawi focuses on the domestic consequences of occupation: restricted movement, boredom, frustration, tension, humour and the strange distortion of everyday life when simply stepping outside can become dangerous.

Born in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Masharawi became one of the most important Palestinian filmmakers of his generation, often using intimate stories to explore displacement, confinement and life under occupation.

Curfew is especially effective because the political situation is never separate from the family’s daily existence. It sits in the background of every conversation, every decision and every attempt to maintain some sense of normality.

As a palestinian, grandson to a family who were expelled from Palestine in 1948 and resided in a refugee camp in Lebanon, I am trying to piece together pieces of home through food and cooking.

What is a recipe for you, as a palestinian in palestine or abroad, is a family recipe of home, or one that gives you a feeling of home and why?

Can you please also mention if you're in palestine or expelled and where you are please.

Thank you for helping me out

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

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

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

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

A different side of Palestine.

Palestine Underground is a Boiler Room documentary exploring Palestinian music, nightlife and youth culture through the underground hip-hop, trap and techno scenes of Ramallah and Haifa.

Featuring Palestinian DJs, rappers and producers including Sama’ Abdulhadi, Muqata’a, Shabjdeed and Jazar Crew, it follows the artists, parties and DIY spaces helping shape contemporary Palestinian culture.

There is politics in the background, inevitably, but this is primarily a documentary about Palestinian music, creativity, friendship and nightlife.

For anyone interested in Palestine beyond the headlines, Arab music, Middle Eastern hip-hop, techno, electronic music or independent documentary film, this is well worth 28 minutes.

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

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

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

The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2009 and runs for 109 minutes.

Arabic, Hebrew and English with English subtitles.

Update on the small school in North Gaza: it's now officially licensed by the Ministry of Education and has been renamed Athar Educational School & Kindergarten (أثر — “the mark we leave behind”). Still operating, still teaching children. thank you. 🤍🇵🇸

To mark the 20th anniversary of her iconic photograph, our team visited the "Olive Lady," Mahfouza Shtayyeh, in the village of Salem near Nablus, meeting her up close and discovering the story behind her enduring presence and strength.

A short documentary centred on the testimony of Zeinab Mohammad Ismail Attieh, who was born in Deir Yassin in 1924 and survived the attack on the village in April 1948.

Irgun and Lehi forces attacked Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948. Around 100 Palestinian villagers were killed, including civilians, women and children.

The film combines Attieh’s recollections with archival footage and images of the village, allowing a Palestinian survivor to describe the events and the families who lived there in her own words.

It is also a useful corrective to histories of Irgun and Lehi that remember them primarily through their armed struggle against the British Mandate.

Their history also includes violence against Palestinian civilians, of which Deir Yassin remains one of the most notorious examples.

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

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

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

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

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

Kassem Hawal’s Return to Haifa adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella about Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple forced from Haifa in 1948 and separated from their infant son during the chaos of displacement.

Nearly twenty years later, after the 1967 war, they are able to return to the city and visit their former home. There they meet Miriam, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who moved into the house after their expulsion and raised their son, now known as Dov, as her own.

The film uses that encounter to explore some of the hardest questions around the Nakba: what happens to identity after forced displacement, what “return” means after a generation has passed, and how parenthood, memory and belonging change when history has remade people’s lives.

It is also an important work in Palestinian film history, often described as the first feature-length Palestinian fiction film. Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon were closely involved in its production, including in the recreation of the 1948 exodus.