How to Watch Films in Times of Despair? ALFILM’s take on Palestine, Solidarity and the Power of Imagination

Amidst the preparations for the 15th edition of ALFILM (The Arab Film Festival Berlin), the attacks of October 7, 2023, took place. The aftermath was undeniably devastating for more than two million people in Gaza, who suffered an unprecedented scale of war atrocities and waves of displacement. In parallel, for hundreds of thousands in Arab diasporic communities and their allies in Germany, a turning point has forced its way through with no prospect of return. In a brief span of time, it became clear that life after October 7 would never be the same as before. Police violence and repressive measures—including excessive use of force, arrests, racial profiling, and raids on the homes of protesters in solidarity with Palestinians or condemning the brutal war on Gaza—have become recurrent.¹ Attempts to censor, silence, and cancel artists, academics, and activists criticising Israeli politics or demonstrating solidarity with Palestinians are too numerous to count. These include notable figures such as Nancy Fraser, Adania Shibli, Candice Breitz, Deborah Feldman, Masha Gessen, as well as politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.² And the worst was a constant sense of vulnerability, disempowerment, and mistrust, exacerbated by media campaigns that continually denounced voices advocating for the rights of Palestinians and by the institutional readiness to undermine freedom of expression—supposedly a pillar of the liberal-secular order—in the name of abiding by the raison d’être of the German state (an utterly controversial and undemocratic notion in itself): the unconditional solidarity with the State of Israel. 

How can we continue our work as a film festival that, for 15 years, has been committed to promoting the diversity of Arab film cultures, challenging clichéd representations of the region, and supporting the ambitions of justice, dignity, and freedom harboured by its people in the present atmosphere? How can we do so if the cause of Palestinian liberation lies at the centre of these ambitions and is emblematic of the histories, politics, and power relations that gave rise to their emergence and set the limits on their prospect of realisation? How can we remain relevant for a fundamental section of our audience, the Arab diasporic communities in Berlin from different generations, in the face of dehumanisation, racialisation, a sense of loss, fear, and agony, that many have become susceptible to since the outbreak of the war in Gaza? How can we navigate the unprecedented constraints on spaces and discourses that do not shy away from condemning the shortsightedness of liberal sensibilities in the face of the Palestinian plight and Israeli aggression?

The questions are diverse and challenging, but the range of options is pretty slim. For the team of the festival,³ highlighting Palestine in such dire times was not merely a matter of choice; it was something upon which the very meaning of our presence, our role as an Arab film festival, and our integrity regarding the values we stand for—as well as our credibility in the eyes of our communities in Berlin—substantially depended. At the same time, the role of art in general, and film in particular, in forging the home we have been deprived of, in cultivating the sense of humanity trampled upon by double standards and political opportunism, is now more than ever subject to evaluation. What is at stake is not only making the act of watching films meaningful amidst an unfolding genocide but also ensuring that it empowers us to resist it—to find a collective language for articulating our pain and rage, to uncover and denounce the moral failures that enable it, and to unmask its atrocities, shrouded in the shadows of fear and silence.

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We decided to dedicate the Spotlight program of the 15th edition to Palestine. The Spotlight program is one of ALFILM’s two main sections. Alongside The Selection, which features contemporary Arab film productions from and about the region, as well as works by Arab filmmakers living outside it, the Spotlight program is a curated section with a different thematic focus each year. It includes both recent productions and film classics, and it aspires to explore the selected theme in depth and emphasise its contemporary relevance for Arab communities through extended film talks and side events, such as panel discussions and masterclasses. But how should a curated program on Palestine look when it plays concurrently with genocidal atrocities against Palestinians? What could films say in times when we are flooded with images of mass destruction, damaged bodies, and children’s faces scared to death? How can they provide us with the means to grieve and resist?  

Many rightfully doubt the futility of making and watching films, especially narrative fiction, in these times. As a Palestinian filmmaker—whom I prefer to keep anonymous—noted in a public talk: “Neither Algerians nor Vietnamese, nor anyone engaged in an anticolonial struggle, could consider making fiction films a priority. We can make fiction after liberation, not before. After liberation, we can sit together, reflect on what has happened, and think about how to rewrite history. However, our role after October 7 and in times of genocide is to be part of the struggle and the community—to make films that document and support the ongoing resistance, not to produce fictitious aesthetic interpretations of events. Fiction cannot change anything.”

These doubts are not merely a product of the present despair following the war in Gaza. Rather, they resonate with earlier reflections on the role of filmmakers that were tied to the emergence of the Palestinian question itself as a film subject, others perhaps as old as the history of cinema itself. Lebanese director Christian Gazi (1934–2013), who was the first Arab filmmaker to address the events of the 1967 war, called for the endurance of resistance despite the disastrous defeat in his lost fiction film El-Fedayon (Fedayeen, 1967) and argued that the Palestinian cause would be best advocated for through documentary films rather than narrative fiction. He added that fiction in Arab cinema had long been shaped by commercial considerations rather than a genuine engagement with the realities of Arab societies.⁴ Furthermore, as an advocate of militant cinema who saw his role as a filmmaker as inseparable from that of a resistance fighter, he found that the styles and forms of narrative fiction fell short of meeting the demands of the Palestinian struggle. 

Long before Gazi, and as early as the 1920s, Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) expressed dissatisfaction with cinema’s dependence on elements he saw as external to its essential language and purpose—namely, music, literature, romance, and theatrical acting. He called for a revolution against the dramatisation techniques popular in German, Russian, and American films of his time, aiming to free cinema from the conventions of narrative fiction and theatrical illusions. For Vertov, this radical transformation was necessary, even if it meant passing “a death sentence on all films, with no exceptions.”⁵ He wrote manifesto-like fragments in which he ridiculed artists and directors as having “nothing to do,” described cameramen and writers as “confused,” and portrayed audiences as “mules” manipulated by “the emotional experience” that fiction films offer them.⁶ However, the dissatisfaction of both Gazi and Vertov with narrative fiction and its techniques did not simply stem from their eagerness to mirror reality as it is. Rather, it was driven by their desire to pave the way for new possibilities in cinema—to narrate, conceive of, and represent a reality that would otherwise remain suppressed or inconceivable. 

Vertov introduced what he called Kino-Eye, an alternative method of filmmaking that emphasised a radical, documentary-based approach. Its aim was not merely to record events without dramatic effects or as they unfold before the human eye. Rather, it sought to transcend the visible world, revealing a richer reality made accessible through the camera. For Vertov, the camera’s sensory capacity was more perfect than human vision, and while we may not be able to “improve the making of our eyes, we can endlessly perfect the camera.”⁷ The problem for him was not the inability of the cinema of his time to reflect reality, but rather the limitations that reality imposes on the medium, undermining its potential to reveal different dimensions of the visible, of time, and of space. Gazi, on the other hand, was not calling for the abandonment of narrative fiction in favour of militant documentaries. Rather, he sought filmmaking techniques and narrative styles that rejected commercial conventions, aiming to do justice to a reality in which Palestinians are compelled to resist and endure the adversities of loss and displacement.

For Gazi, Arab mainstream cinema’s portrayal of Palestine tended to manipulate the masses through excessive sentimentality and ideological framing—an opinion also shared by the pioneering Palestinian filmmakers of the Palestine Film Unit.⁸ Gazi aspired to a new cinema that blends documentary techniques with fiction, the objectivity of the unfolding events before the camera with the subjective perspective of the filmmaker behind it. Gazi’s commitment to the Palestinian question is what led him to question the rigidity of the boundaries between fiction and documentary, aspiring to a cinema whose mission is neither to betray realities by manufacturing shallow illusions nor to pretend to do justice to reality by capturing it with objective precision, but to enable a deeper analytical understanding of it. 

In this scheme of things, we can argue that making films about Palestine, and by proxy, watching them, matters in times of adversities. These films do not serve as mere instruments in the hands of the struggle or as faithful records of its primary events; they also allow us to understand the complexities of the struggle, to situate it within its historical and affective dimensions, and to situate ourselves, in the varieties of our social standings and locations, vis-à-vis the realities of Palestinians and their quest for justice and liberation. They lend us a hand in coping with the embodied ramifications of this struggle in our own contexts, in the here and now. Here, it is not the narrative form of the film that matters, but rather the sincerity of the narrative—regardless of its form—in depicting the cause, the affective dispositions it conveys, and the modes of action and reaction it evokes in us as viewers. For this, we also need narrative fiction—not for the sake of entertainment or solace, but as a means of granting us access to imagining different worlds, a necessary condition for making our own freer and more just world.

And it is by extending from these insights that ALFILM’s Spotlight program on Palestine has been curated. Two guiding thoughts were essential for the curation process. First, films as a medium of art and movie theatres as sites of their exhibition and reception are capable of empowering and inspiring, of providing us with means of resistance and modes of resilience in times of despair. Significantly, they grant us narrative vehicles for political imagination—for forging alternative scripts of organising political communities in times when real politics and liberal scripts have proven their ultimate failure, if not their complicity in enabling a genocide. Second, the question of Palestine has become an instance that highlights the urgency of self-reflection—for exposing the moral lapses and inconsistencies that underpin our current social and political orders, for reimagining solidarity, its scope, and the role film can play in buttressing its efforts and expanding its networks. Our main concern in this program was to stress that the question of Palestine cannot be confined to a specific territory or historical experience. Rather; today, and in the face of the repression, the censorship, and the dehumanising rhetoric we have been experiencing in Germany, the question of Palestine seems to concern us all and affect us all, here and elsewhere urging us to reassess the candidness of our commitment to justice, freedom, and equality. 

The Spotlight program was indeed titled Here is Elsewhere. Palestine in Arab Cinema and Beyond, and its focus was not only on how Palestinians represented their own struggle on screen but also on how this struggle sparked compassionate encounters, expressions of solidarity, journeys of self-exploration, and quests for learning and unlearning about and from the other. These encounters and journeys unfolded regionally and globally, in the Arab world and beyond. It took its inspiration from two icons of world cinema: one non-Palestinian and one Palestinian, Jean-Luc Godard and Elia Suleiman. 

Godard’s co-directed film with Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), inspired the program’s title and served as its closing event. For Godard, the encounter with the Palestinian struggle offered a way of learning how to make films politically, which implies the unlearning of conventional tools, aesthetics, and modes of representation he became disillusioned with after a prolific era of successful films.⁹ Godard aspired to reinvent himself as a politically engaged artist, if not as a militant filmmaker, then as a revolutionary anti-imperialist. He sought radical themes, languages, and forms of narration suited to this role. It was in this context that he began collaborating with Jean-Pierre Gorin in a film collective named after Dziga Vertov, evoking the latter’s legacy of purging cinema of its illusory effects and bourgeois aesthetics. However, Godard’s planned film about Palestine ultimately became a film about the film he failed to make—about his own illusions and defeats, and the unbridgeable gap between reality and representation. For him, Palestine was not only a site for learning how to combat imperialism but also how one could be defeated by it. For us in ALFILM, including Ici et ailleurs in this program was meant less as a tribute to Godard, but to recall the triumphs and pitfalls of the global solidarity movement with Palestine. It was meant as a reminder to self-proclaimed leftists and anti-racists that Palestine is not only an integral part of the history of the European left but also holds a place in the canon of European auteur cinema.¹⁰ A reminder that would also confront the same actors with their own failures and double standards.¹¹

In a similar vein, Elia Suleiman inspired the program with his ideas on the extraterritoriality of the Palestinian condition, on the one hand, and the globality of the Palestinian question on the other hand. When Suleiman stated in a notable interview that “Palestine does not exist. It has no borders. It has all the chaotic elements that lead you to question space, borders, and crossings,”¹² his intention was, of course, not to deny the existence of Palestinians or their right to national self-determination. Rather, he sought to offer Palestinians possibilities to exist, to nourish and narrate their quest for justice and freedom at all times and in all places—despite recurring displacements and decades of political deadlock, in defiance of the absence of defined borders and accessible crossings, and despite being deprived of territorial sovereignty. And when he refers, in the context of his latest film It Must Be Heaven (2019), to how our world has become Palestinianised,¹³ he invites us to consider how the Palestinian condition paradoxically reproduces itself in different configurations across the globe, as evident in institutionalised violence, systems of surveillance, checkpoints, and security regimes. In this sense, speaking about Palestine is not simply a discourse on a specific geographical territory with a particular history and a present imbued with violence, occupation, and dispossession. It is also about the violence through which histories are erased, people are dispossessed, geographies are (de)constructed, and futures are cancelled—at any time and everywhere. Inasmuch as the Palestinian longing for liberation has persisted across generations, trajectories of exile, and shifting political conditions, the Palestinian question itself has become open to transposition and appropriation, endowed with transcendent qualities, mirror images, parallel lives, and afterlives. It has provided a framework in which the oppressed, the dispossessed, the colonised, the marginalised, and all those who are engaged in congruent struggles can find relatable narratives of identification, blueprints for resisting power, and unmasking its tactics. 

If Palestine, for Suleiman, can exist everywhere, then for Mustafa Abu Ali (1940-2009)—a pioneering Palestinian filmmaker and one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit—the scope of Palestinian cinema, or rather the cinema of Palestine, cannot be delineated by birth or nationality. Its scope is less a matter of nationality than of political belonging.¹⁴ The boundaries of this sphere of belonging are defined by a resolute commitment to justice for Palestinians, the endorsement of their right to self-determination and a life in dignity, and an immanent critique of imperialist politics and oppressive practices, whenever and wherever they unfold. In this spirit, the program included films such as Samouni Road (Stefano Savona, 2018), The Apollo of Gaza (Nicolas Wadimoff, 2018), and The Tower (Mats Grorud, 2018), which offer compassionate and self-reflective accounts of solidarity with the Palestinian cause—without hijacking Palestinian voices or exoticising their plight. Meanwhile, R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (Mohanad Yaqubi, 2022), highlighted a forgotten chapter in the history of the solidarity movement with Palestine by exploring a rediscovered Japanese archive of films. Life Is Beautiful (Mohamed Jabaly, 2023), on the other hand, demonstrates that solidarity with Palestine within the film community is not limited to filmmakers alone but extends to festivals and film audiences, who firmly stood behind a Palestinian filmmaker in his journey to bring the stories of his besieged people in Gaza to screens around the world.

The program also featured two masterpieces of Arab cinema on Palestine. The first was Al-Makhdu’un (The Dupes, Tawfik Saleh, 1972), an adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun (1963). The film not only marked the first international celebration of Syrian cinema but was also lauded by the filmmakers of the Palestine Film Unit for its exceptional approach among Arab narrative films on Palestine. It avoided illusionary heroism, empty slogans, and paternalistic portrayals, instead courageously depicting the tragic realities of the Palestinian diaspora in Arab countries. The second film was Bab el Shams (The Gate of the Sun, Yousry Nassrallah, 2004), an adaptation of a major novel by Elias Khoury. This poignant epic, spanning four and a half hours, chronicles the odyssey of Palestinians since the Nakba over the course of 50 years. With this film, Nassrallah not only sought to pay tribute to the Palestinian struggle but also aimed to break away from the prevalent ideological portrayals of Palestine in Arab—and particularly Egyptian—cinema. These portrayals often instrumentalised the Palestinian cause to consolidate regime power while attributing heroic virtue to their own political elites. On these notes, Nassarallah, while explaining his choice for Khoury’s novel, said: “I’m not Palestinian, but I’ve been paying for Palestine all my life. For sixty years, I’ve been told, shut up, don’t open your mouth, and the only narrative that’s been allowed on Palestine is the narrative of Nasser, Saddam Hussein, and Hafez al-Assad. That’s what gives the novel its legitimacy: taking a narrative that was monopolised by governments and bizarre organisations, and telling them, you don’t understand anything. You don’t know how to talk about Palestine. I know how to talk about Palestine.”¹⁵ In fact, these two films invite us to reflect not simply on Arab solidarity, but also Arab failures and complicity in aggravating the sufferings of Palestinians. 

While ALFILM’s Spotlight program sought to reposition the Palestinian struggle—both its present and the history of its resistance—at the heart of contemporary global politics and solidarity practices, articulated through various artistic attempts to create meaning and narrate events via cinema, the Cine Concert Palestine – A Revised Narrative, performed live by Lebanese sound designer Rana Eid and composer Cynthia Zaven, aimed to reposition Palestine within an often-overlooked historical context: colonialism. The plight of Palestinians is inseparable from the violent erasure and dismantling of collective forms of being, belonging, and ways of feeling, living, and grappling with home, history, and tradition—disruptions brought forth by colonial practices. In this sense, the Nakba can be seen as both an intensification and a culmination of violent processes that began much earlier. Eid and Zaven created a 30-minute film by re-editing 77 silent clips shot in Palestine, mainly in Gaza and Jerusalem, on 35mm between 1914 and 1918 by the occupying British forces. They added sound and music, specially crafted as a critical commentary on the colonial footage. 

To understand and counter the workings of colonialism, one cannot be content with merely condemning its material effects, such as occupation, exploitation, and dispossession. One must also grasp its claims and modalities of power: how colonialism operates through systems of representation that stage the world, assemble and disassemble its bits and pieces, and position colonised subjects and lands within or outside the narrative layouts it constructs in ways that facilitate their disciplining and exploitation. In this understanding, decolonisation is not merely about producing new images, counter-narratives, and representations, but about unsettling colonial representations themselves: overwriting their absences and presences, breaking their logic, and infiltrating their narrative structures with new signs and references. That is precisely what Eid and Zaven achieved through their editing work and live sound intervention, which was met with enthusiastic applause and emotional outbursts from the audience in the packed auditorium.

ALFILM’s Spotlight program was met with tremendous success. It was the most successful edition in the festival’s history based on audience numbers. Most screenings were sold out—even for film classics like The Dupes—and audiences engaged in lively discussions with filmmakers and guest speakers. These conversations often continued in more informal settings, spilling into cinema foyers, nearby cafés, and bars. Inspired by the colours of the Palestinian flag and the traditional art of tatreez, the festival poster can still be seen in public spaces across the city, even in places frequented by those not previously drawn to Arab cinema or culture. The festival’s impact remains tangible today, reflected in ongoing declarations of support, gratitude, and interest in collaboration that the ALFILM team continues to receive from the community. 

At many moments during the passionate discussions that followed the films or unfolded in packed panels, I had the peculiar sense that what was happening was somehow unreal—or if it was, then miraculously so. The possibilities for interaction and expression, for openly sharing thoughts, personal stories, and emotions about Palestine, the ongoing war, and the complicity of governments and institutions—made possible by cinema spaces and the collective ritual of movie-going—felt like a fleeting shimmer of hope.

It was a refuge from the oppressive atmosphere that, at the same time, cast thick shadows over Berlin, suffused with fear, silence, and despair. In this sense, the space of cinema became a site of political mobilisation and empowerment—a space for imagining alternative horizons for political action. It offered a moment to contemplate, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian cause, the deeper meanings and implications of a commitment to freedom and justice. And all this, at a time and place where artists, activists, academics, and cultural practitioners are increasingly denounced and stripped of political legitimacy as soon as they speak in defence of Palestinians’ right to live in dignity.

Endnotes