Palestine: Stolen Images (2018)

Documentary, 1h 50m

Tracing the last 18 years of conflict between Israel and Palestine, this film-essay reflects on the shared history of national liberation movements in Latin America and the Middle East. Directed by Argentinian documentarian Rodrigo Vazquez, the film combines exclusive interviews with historical figures, direct-cinema from the battle-field and never-before-seen archival footage found in 2011, gathering dust on a shelf, in the Cuban Film Institute.

Director: Rodrigo Vazquez

Emwas: Restoring Memories (2016)

Documentary, 52m

Filmmaker Dima Abu Ghoush was born in the village of Emwas, 16 miles from Jerusalem in the Latrun area of the West Bank. On the second day of the 1967 War, Dima, aged 2, and her family were expelled by the Israeli army, like all the other villagers, along with all inhabitants of the nearby villages of Yalo and Bayt Nuba. All her life, Dima has heard stories about Emwas, but she knows this place only as Canada Park, which was established by Israel in 1973 in the villages’ place. In 2009, with the help of family and friends, Dima decides to make a model of Emwas as it used to be. The film revives the lost village through the collective memory of those who used to live there and still dream of returning.

Director: Dima Abu Ghoush

Cinematography: Muayad Alayan

Editor: Toby Trotter

Producer: Baker Zarour

One More Jump (2019)

Documentary, 1h 13m

Gaza Parkour Team founder Abdallah has managed to escape Gaza. His friend Jehad still lives there, training young athletes for whom sport remains the only thing imbued with hope amidst the conflict. Is it better to leave to fulfil your dreams or stay and fight for your country? The question is the common thread running through this deeply moving account of sport, friendship, and exile.

Writer & Director: Emanuele Gerosa

Producer: Enrica Capra

Director of Photography: Matteo Delbò

Editor: Nicolò Tettamanti

Music: Zeno Gabaglio

Fixer in Gaza: Mohammed Abu Safia

Route 181 (2003)

Documentary, 4h 32m

Route 181, offers an unusual vision of the inhabitants of Palestine-Israel, a common vision of an Israeli and a Palestinian.

In the summer of 2002, for two long months, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi travelled together from the south to the north of their country of birth, traced their trajectory on a map and called it Route 181. This virtual line follows the borders outlined in Resolution 181, which was adopted by the United Nations on November 29th 1947 to partition Palestine into two states.

As they travel along this route, they meet women and men, Israeli and Palestinian, young and old, civilians and soldiers, filming them in their everyday lives. Each of these characters has their own way of evoking the frontiers that separate them from their neighbours: concrete, barbed-wire, cynicism, humour, indifference, suspicion, aggression…Frontiers have been built on the hills and in the plains, on mountains and in valleys but above all inside the minds and souls of these two peoples and in the collective unconscious of both societies.

Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, takes us on a disorientating journey across this tiny territory with vast ramifications.

Directors: Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan

Private Investigation (2002)

Documentary, 1h 30m

".... I used to ... all Palestinian kids in Israel, used to hold the Israeli flag and sing for Israel in Arabic. Each year we used to do that, to celebrate, we would prepare dance shows, theater plays and songs! A lot of decorations and flags everywhere... And no one said anything. Imagine we used to stand on lines at the schoolyard each with his little blue and white flag. But the next day which is the Independence Day, a free day when all families and friends were supposed to go out on a picnic somewhere, or to the beach... my father always used to be sick and we never left the house on that specific day.

This is my story, this memory is mine. It goes back twenty years and it has branched out and played an essential part in my buildup, in what I am today. This film was born as I was rethinking all of this, and from my feeling haunted by the deafening silence of my country.

It is a documentary on living as a Palestinian in the Israeli state, holding an Israeli ID card and a Palestinian memory and belonging.”

Director: Ula Tabari

Samouni Road (2018)

Documentary, 2h 8m

In the rural outskirts of Gaza City a small community of farmers, the Samouni extended family, is about to celebrate a wedding. It's going to be the first celebration since the latest war. Amal, Fuad, their brothers and cousins have lost their parents, their houses and their olive trees. The neighborhood where they live is being rebuilt. As they replant trees and plow fields, they face their most difficult task: piecing together their own memory. Through these young survivors' recollections, Samouni Road conveys a deep, multifaceted portrait of a family before, during and after the tragic event that changed its life forever.

Director: Stefano Savona

Cast: Amal Samouni, Fouad Samouni

Producers: Penelope Bortoluzzi, Marco Alessi, Cécile Lestrade

Music: Giulia Tagliavia

Editor: Luc Forveille

Shorts 3

Naim and Wadee'a (2000)

Dir. Najwa Najjar // 2000 // Documentary // 20 Mins

This documentary by Najwa Najjar explores social life in Yaffa through a miniature portrait of a Palestinian couple, Wadee’a Aghabi and Naim Azar, the filmmaker’s grandparents who lived there before the expulsion in 1948. The story is built on the oral accounts of Naim and Wadee’a’s three daughters, offering a glimpse into the memories of a couple forced to leave their home, and the effect displacement had on their family.

Solomon’s Stone (2015)

Dir. Ramzi Maqdisi // 2015 // Comedy // 26 mins

Hussein, a young Palestinian man, receives a letter from the Israeli post office to appear in person to receive a package. He has to pay the sum of 20,000 $ US dollars in order to collect that package. Hussein’s curiosity to find out what the package contains drives him to sell everything he owns, despite the outright rejection of his mother, changing their lives forever.
Adapted from the novel Blue Light by Hussein Barghouty.

Strawberry (2017)

Dir. Aida Kaadan // 2017 // Drame // 17 mins

Samir, 43, is the owner of a shoe shop in Ramallah who has never seen the sea. He decides to sneak past the Israeli border with other Palestinian construction workers to fulfill his dream of seeing the sea. Instead, he ends up at a construction site where Anas, 22, asks him to work for him.

Ambience (2017)

Dir. Wissam Aljafari // 2017 // Experimental // 15 mins

Two young Palestinians try to record a demo for a Music Competition inside a noisy crowded refugee camp. While failing to record because of the chaos surrounding them, they discover a creative method for meeting the deadline.

Roof Knocking (2017)

Dir. Sina Salimi // 2017 // Drama // 13 mins

In Gaza, a woman prepares a meal for her family to break the fast in the month of Ramadan. A phone call by an Israeli soldier alerts her of the bombing of her building in 10 minutes. Coming to accept her family’s fate is the only way she has to make a stand for her life, with grim consequences.

Yamo (2011)

Documentary, 1h 6m

It's a film about today, about the choices we make in life. A film about time fleeing at full speed and time suspended. This is not a portrait of my mother, nor of my memory, nor of my house, nor of my family. Yamo is the mixture of all these elements which brings us towards a cut-down dialogue between two generations. A dialogue about dreams, failures, the present, and the future.

Writer & Director: Rami El-Nihawi

Producers: Monica Borgmann & Lokman Slim for UMAM Productions / Rami El-Nihawi for Sakado

Photography: Rami Nihawi & Maroon Asmar

Sound Recordist: Rayan Obeideyin

Editing: Anne de Mo

Sound Design: Lama Sawaya

War Generation - Beirut (1988)

Documentary, 50m

In Beirut, children grow up on the barricades and soon trade their toy pistols for real machine guns. War Generation - Beirut explores the lives, dreams and fears of three generations of young people living in the heart of the civil war in Lebanon. This seminal work from Jean Chamoun and Mai Masri remains one of the most powerful anti-war documents of the period.

Produced & Directed By: Jean Chamoun & Mai Masri

Photographed & Edited By: Mai Masri

Sound: Jean Chamoun

Narrator: Margaret Magnusson

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

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)