Massacre (2005)

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In Memory of Lokman Slim

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Documentary, 1h 38m

Between September 16 and 18, 1982, for two nights and three days, the killers of Sabra and Shatila went about their heinous crimes. In the end, they had murdered between 1,000 and 3,000 Palestinian civilians, predominantly women, children and old people. The precise number of victims - both those killed and those missing - is not known to this very day. The perpetrators primarily originated from the ranks of the Forces Libanaises, a Christian militia affiliated to Israel. The logistics for this massacre were provided by the Israeli Army, under the auspices of the former Minister of Defence and current Minister President, Ariel Sharon. In 1982, the massacre in the Lebanese Palestinian camps deeply shook the public throughout the world, but today it has been (almost) entirely forgotten. This is despite the fact that it is a role model for all the massacres that followed: for example that in Rwanda or those committed during the Yugoslavian wars. Again and again, the unanswered questions surface: what drives people to such excesses of brutality, and how are the perpetrators able to live on? Massaker is - both in contents and aesthetically - a psycho-political study of six perpetrators, who participated in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila both on orders and on their own personal initiative. The film intertwines the mental dispositions of the killers with their political environment and broaches the phenomenon of collective violence through their accounts.

Directors: Monica Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen

Production: Joachim Ortmanns for Lichtblick Film

Editing: Anne de Mo, Bernd Euscher

Cinematography: Nina Menkes

Winner of the Fipresci Preis, Panorama, Berlinale 2005

A World Not Ours (2012)

Documentary, 1h 33m

A World Not Ours is an intimate, humorous, portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive, and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family.

Director: Mahdi Fleifel

Prodocers: Patrick Campbell & Mahdi Fleifel

Editor: Michael Aaglund

Sound Designer: Zhe Wu

Fix Me (2009)

Documentary, 1h 38m

Palestinian filmmaker Raed Andoni doesn’t spare himself in his search for the cause of the headaches that have tormented him for many years. He allows a foreign crew to film his time spent in therapy—the fact that they don’t speak Arabic makes it easier for him to embark on the sessions without inhibitions.

The recurring themes throughout these meetings—filmed from behind a two-way mirror—are the consequences of the Israeli occupation. The same applies to Andoni’s everyday life, some of which he films himself. Checkpoints, police violence and the huge West Bank wall are part of it, in both mundane and powerful ways. He visits his mother, his politically aware sister and her son, and he also talks with the friends he made when he was a political prisoner. Their conversations may be serious, but they are filled with the black humor and philosophical detachment necessary to survive. Andoni’s quest leads to personal and universal insights, and it also allows repressed memories of traumatic events to rise to the surface. These memories formed the basis of his 2017 documentary Ghost Hunting.

Director: Raed Andoni

Production: Raed Andoni - Dar Films Production, Palmyre Baldinier - Les Films de Zayna, Nicolas Wadimoff - Akka Films, Nadia Turincev - Rouge International

Cinematography: Filip Zumbrunn, Aldo Mugnier

Editing: Tina Baz, Saed Andoni, Samer Qatta

Music: Eik Rug, Yousef Hbeisch

Palestine Blues (2006)

Documentary, 1h 12m

What is left for Palestinian farmers who learn that in 24hrs the Israeli Army will confiscate their lands for the construction of the wall? What do people do when their very survival is threatened by one of the world's most powerful armies? Palestine Blues tells the story of a village's confusion, desperation, and resistance, their daily victories and wrenching defeats. Unexpectedly filled with moments of poetry and humour this film's intimate access, unforgettable characters and story structure blur the line between documentary and narrative. Filmed at times with a hidden camera and at times under extreme duress, PalestinianAmerican filmmaker Nida Sinnokrot gives us a lasting chronicle of a people and their ancient lifegiving orchards, ever threatened by destruction.

Director: Nida Sinnokrot

Tell Your Tale, Little Bird (2007)

Documentary, 1h 30m

Seven militant women (fedaiyat) of the revolutionary generation tell the story of the Palestinian resistance through accounts of their own lives.

Cut from 35 hours of interviews with leaders of the armed struggle, the film presents an image of confident, unapologetic and proud feminine identity. Together, the memories of these women narrate the dream of a generation, yet unrealized.

Tell Your Tale, Little Bird is a testament to the power of remembrance, positioning memory as an essential element of feminist struggle. The film reminds us that this oral tradition may carry recollection of past resistance, but it is in the very practice of retelling women’s stories that the political act has persisted.

Director: Arab Loutfi

Subjects: Leila Khaled, Therese Halasa, Aisha Odeh, Rashida Obeida, Rasmea Odeh, Widad Qamari, Amina Dahbour

Jenin, Jenin (2002)

54 mins, Documentary

"Where is God," an elderly man desperately wonders when surveying the debris in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin.

Directed and co-produced by Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri, Jenin, Jenin includes testimony from Jenin residents after the Israeli army's Defensive Wall operation. The city and camp were the scenes of fierce fighting which ended with Jenin flattened and scores of Palestinians dead. Palestinians as well as numerous human rights groups accused Israel of committing war crimes in the attack. The United Nations appointed a commission of inquiry, but Israel refused to let its members visit the scene.

Banned in Israel, Jenin Jenin is dedicated to Iyad Samudi, the producer of the film, who returned home to Yamun after the shooting of the film was completed. On June 23, as Israeli forces besieged Yamun, Samudi was shot and killed as he was leaving a militarily-closed area with three friends.

Winner of Best Film — Carthage International Film Festival

Winner of the International Prize for Mediterranean Documentary Filmmaking & Reporting

Directed By: Mohammad Bakri

Produced by:
Iyad Samudi and Mohammad Bakri

Written by:
Mohammad Bakri

Edited by:
Leandro Pantanella

Ambulance (2016)

Documentary, 1h 20m

A raw, first-person account of the last war in Gaza in the summer of 2014. Mohamed Jabaly, a young man from Gaza City, joins an ambulance crew as war approaches, looking for his place in a country under siege, where at times there seems to be no foreseeable future. While thousands of things are published on the recurring violence in Gaza, the stories behind them remain hidden. Not this one.

Director: Mohamed Jabaly

Saken (2014)

Documentary, 1h 30m

Saken is an observational documentary set in Jordan that follows the friendship of Ibrahim, a Palestinian fedai who was injured in Lebanon while on duty before the 1982 israeli invasion on Lebanon, leading to his paralysis, and Walid an Egyptian man who has been Ibrahim's companion and caretaker for the past 15 years. Saken is a film about friendship and sacrifice, how some people’s destinies are linked and hard to be broken.

Writer & Director: Sandra Madi
Producer: Majd Hijjawi
Director of Photography: Ali Saadi

My Love Awaits Me by the Sea (2013)

Documentary, 1h 20m

How do your return to a place that only exists in your mind? ‘My Love Awaits Me by the Sea’ is a poetic documentary narrating the story of the director Mais Darwazah, who takes a first time journey back to her homeland, Palestine. She leaves a secluded reality and follows a lover whom she has never met; Hasan, a Palestinian artist, who unveils a beautiful and utopian world to her. Fairytale and reality are woven together to question the elusiveness of place and the need to believe in dreams.

Director: Mais Darwazah

Producer: Rula Nasser

Infiltrators (2012)

Documentary, 1h 10m

The checkpoint is closed: “Detour, detour!” shouts a taxi driver, announcing the beginning of yet another uncertain search for a way around the barriers curtailing Palestinian movement in the West Bank.

Infiltrators is a visceral “road movie” that chronicles the daily travails of Palestinians of all backgrounds as they seek routes through, under, around, and over a bewildering matrix of barriers.

Following this high stakes “game” of cat and mouse with a handheld video camera, Khaled Jarrarʼs debut documentary was the standout success at the 2012 Dubai International Film Festival, winning the Muhr Arab Documentary Prize, the Special Jury Prize, and the International Critics Prize.

Director: Khaled Jarrar

Production: Sami Said, Mohanad Yaqubi

Editing: Gaetan Harem

Music: Carl Svensson

L’Olivier (1976)

Documentary, 1h 23m

L’Olivier responds to a concern French public support for the Palestinian cause is diminishing in the wake of the 1972 Munich operation. Structured to chronicle the Palestinian story and to explain the current chapter in the struggle, the film calls for global militant solidarities and, particularly, for European political engagements.

Directors: Groupe Cinéma Vincennes (Ali Akika, Guy Chapoullie, Danièle Dubroux, Serge Le Péron, Jean Narboni, Dominique Villain) 

Mixing: Michel Coomo

Documents: Visnews, Newsreel, ORTF, Cinemathequ Palestinienne, Video.Out

Composition: Mustafa Al-Kurd

Illustrations: Mustapha Al-Hallaj

5 Minutes from Home (2007)

Documentary, 52m

The Jerusalem Airport lies along the road that links Jerusalem to Ramallah. It has been occupied by Israeli army since 1967, at a 5 kilometer distance from Ramallah and 10 kilometer distance from Jerusalem. Today, to the east of the runway, a huge military checkpoint blocks the Jerusalem-Ramallah road, a dead end street.
Nahed Awwad discovers that life has not always been like this, and that this sad spot used to be a place where international aircrafts landed in the 1950s and 1960s, when Palestinians traveled freely. The happy images and testimonies of the past contrast bitterly with those of the present where access is denied to the aviation zone that is now being besieged behind barbed wire and soon will be trapped behind the Israeli Separation Wall.
Nahed Awwad goes to meet this place, evoking the past in order to have a better apprehension of the present: today’s Palestinian reality that is marked by forgetfulness.

Director: Nahed Awwad

Producer by: Bertrand Glosset (Karavan Films), Nicolas Wadimoff (Akka Films)

Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (2009)

Documentary, 1h 29m

This political essay unfolds the invention and the visual history of the world-famous citrus fruit originating from Palestine, and known the world over as "Jaffa oranges". While the orange became the symbol of the Zionist enterprise and the state of Israel, for Palestinians it symbolises the loss of their homeland and its destruction. Through a careful reading of the visual representation of the brand, the film reflects on western phantasms related to the ‘Orient,’ the ‘holy land,’ and the State of Israel, and unveils the untold story of what was once a communal symbol, and an industry common to Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

Director: Eyal Sivan

Editor: Audrey Maurion

With the Participation of: Sami Abou Shahadeh, Ismaïl Abou Shahadeh, Haïm Gouri
Rona Sela, Elias Sanbar, Amnon Raz Krakotzkin, Gideon Makoff, Aviezer Chelouche, Tomer Chelouche

The Wanted 18 (2014)

Documentary, 1h 15m

This animated documentary about the efforts of Palestinians in Beit Sahour to start a small local dairy industry during the First Intifada, hiding a herd of 18 dairy cows from Israeli security forces when the dairy collective was deemed a threat to Israel's national security. The film combines documentary interviews with those involved in the events, archival footage, drawings, black-and-white stop-motion animation as well as re-enactments, and was co-directed by Palestinian visual artist and director Amer Shomali and Canadian filmmaker Paul Cowan. The film was the Palestinian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards.

Directors: Amer Shomali, Paul Cowan

Producer: Saed Andoni

Cinematographers: German Gutierrez, Daniel Villeneuve

Editor: Aube Foglia

“Such a cleverly subversive act deserves a cleverly subversive mode of cinematic expression”

— Variety

Ghost Hunting (2017)

Documentary, 1h 34m

Director Raed Andoni places a newspaper advertisement in Ramallah. He is looking for former inmates of the Moskobiya interrogation centre in Jerusalem. In his ad he asks that the men should also have experience as craftsmen, architects or actors. After a casting process that almost feels like role play, he arranges for a replica of the centre’s interrogation rooms and cells to be built to scale inside a hall – under close supervision from the former inmates and based on their memories. In this realistic setting the men subsequently re-enact their interrogations, discuss details about the prison, and express the humiliation they experienced during their detention.

Using techniques that are reminiscent of the so-called ‘theatre of the oppressed’ they work together to dramatise their real-life experiences. Their reconstruction brings long repressed emotions and undealt with trauma to the fore. Working on the film takes its toll on the men – both physically and mentally. The director also appears in front of the camera; not only is he creating a stage for his protagonists, he is also coming to terms with his own fragmented memories of imprisonment in Moskobiya thirty years previously.

Directors: Raed Andoni

Producer: Palmyre Badinier

Cinematographer: Camille Cottagnoud

Editor: Gladys Joujou

Line Producer: Bassam Jarbawi

Assistant Director: Wadee Hanani

Starring: Ramzi Maqdisi, Atef Al-Akhras, Mohammed Khattab, Wafa Mari

“A boldly original take on the phantom menace of post-traumatic stress”

— Hollywood Reporter