“While editing, I stopped the missiles from falling on Gaza”: Notes from the 11th Reel Palestine Film Festival

In Dubai’s warm winter sunshine, throngs of cinema goers queued up outside Cinema Akil. Many sported keffiyehs and some held cups of bright yellow barrad, the Gazan lemon-flavoured iced slushy that’s become synonymous with summers in the Strip. The cinema’s vintage letter board displayed the latest films as well as a count of the days since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. The 11th Reel Palestine Film Festival, held from January 24 to February 2 earlier this year, took place during the brief lull in Israel’s attacks on Gaza following the January ceasefire. The festival showed eight features and 13 shorts, and was part of a wider programme of workshops and a souk of Palestinian arts and craftsmanship. Reel Palestine has showcased Palestinian cinema since 2015; for the past three years, the festival has been hosted by Cinema Akil, an independent venue established in Dubai in 2014. Now located in the art district Alserkal Avenue, it prides itself on being the Gulf’s first arthouse cinema. In a country that has become somewhat of a pariah in the Arab world for its attempt to balance its relations with Israel and contend with popular support for Palestine, Cinema Akil is a rare space of unambiguous and visible Palestinian solidarity. The atmosphere outside was joyful, a celebration of Palestinian culture, and there was a sense of community as the audience piled into the single-screen cinema. As the festival kicked off inside, however, the celebratory mood was mixed with an atmosphere of collective grief. Festival director Dana Sadek began her opening night address by calling for a minute of silence. 

Palestinian cinema has always been political, and the clash of different narratives over the country’s fate has claimed real casualties. Israel’s occupation has silenced Palestinian voices for decades, though perhaps never as obviously as in the past 21 months, when the genocide in Gaza has claimed the lives of over 56,000 people, of which more than 180 were journalists.¹ “There is a war going on about narratives and stories,” said Rashid Masharawi in a video call that followed the screening of Palestine’s 2025 Academy Awards entry, From Ground Zero (2024), which he produced. An anthology of 22 shorts shot in Gaza since October 2023, From Ground Zero paints a portrait of humanity and resilience amid boundless loss and destruction. It includes films by first-timers and seasoned directors – documentaries as well as works of fiction and animation – and provides a rare insight into a world where journalism is restricted and deadly. Alaa Damo’s 24 Hours follows one man who survived three bombings in a single day. Muhammad Alshareef’s No Signal chronicles the desperate search for survivors under the rubble, while Aws Al-Banna’s Jad and Natalie offers a heartbreaking tribute to the director’s fiancée Nour, killed in an attack on her neighbourhood. Other films display levity and joy despite the tragic conditions many grapple with. Nidal Damo’s Everything is Fine tracks a stand-up comedian and his struggle to find water to shower and dress up before a performance at a refugee camp. In Flash Back, Islam Al Zrieai singles out a young girl, Farah, who finds comfort in dancing to cope with the trauma of the bombings.

Beyond the stories they tell, the films provide a window into the sensory landscape of Gaza. The never-ending and unnerving hum of an Israeli drone dominates the soundscape. Tent cities morph into sets; children’s drawings of the war become stop-motion films. Suffocating shots from under the rubble show the dust, chaos and panic in the aftermath of attacks while views of the boundless expanse of the Mediterranean offer a horizon free from the smoke of bombs. In Soft Skins (Khamis Masharawi), children explain how their mothers have written their names on their bodies to identify them in case they are killed, leaving viewers to shudder thinking about the harrowing circumstances in which this would be necessary. “I couldn’t sleep,” one little girl says, “so I got up and started rubbing it off.”  

From Ground Zero

What role, if any, can cinema play in a place ravaged by war? That films are still being made and edited with little access to electricity and signal is a testament to the drive and resilience of Gazan filmmakers. In Sorry Cinema, director Ahmad Hassouna apologises to his beloved medium as he breaks up a clapperboard for firewood. “The priority was not making films,” said Masharawi, “it was saving lives.” And yet, his project resonated with filmmakers stranded in Gaza as well as audiences abroad. With From Ground Zero, Masharawi claimed he wanted to focus not on politics but on human stories, yet in the current context, even the most mundane tales double as political statements. The shorts he’s put together are an effort to document, a bid to bear witness, and a reclamation of humanity in a world that has reduced Palestinians to numbers and casualty figures. “I wanted to give the chance to the filmmakers who are in Gaza now, they have to tell the stories,” Masharawi went on. “Our main aim is to break the silence. We have to save our story.”

A similar drive to bear witness is central to Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi’s A State of Passion (2024), a documentary about Palestinian-British reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. Abu Sittah – best known, perhaps, for the harrowing press conference he gave while surrounded by lifeless bodies in front of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City in October 2023 – has worked in Gaza’s hospitals during wars on six occasions. Mansour and Khalidi document his return from his latest 43-day stint in Gaza and probe the man’s commitment to his practice and country. A State of Passion is a tribute to Abu Sittah’s work and to his wife Dima, a daughter of Gaza and the unsung hero of his life, who supports and enables his work looking after their teenage sons without ever questioning her husband’s dedication to his patients. The film doesn’t shy away from the horrors of Abu Sittah’s experiences in Gaza’s shattered healthcare system. It is both an attempt to stir up indignation and a testament to the unwavering love Palestinians show for their homeland.

Far in time and space from the Strip today, another Gazan grapples with the weight of navigating the world as a Palestinian. At a youth centre in Tromsø in 2014, filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly is filling in the online application form for a Norwegian visa. But as he searches for his country of origin, the drop-down menu only allows him to select “Stateless”. “I discovered that I wasn’t recognised as a Palestinian,” Jabaly ponders in voiceover. The filmmaker travelled to Norway from Gaza for what was supposed to be a month-long trip, but while in Norway, the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was closed indefinitely, consigning him to an involuntary exile. Unable to claim asylum without giving up his Palestinian nationality and barred from obtaining a work visa because the Norwegian government doesn’t consider the self-taught filmmaker as a professional, Jabaly faces deportation. With nowhere to go, he finds himself caught between an immigration system that doesn’t recognise him and an adoptive community ready to fight for him. Jabaly filmed the process, and the result is Al haya helwa (Life is Beautiful, 2023), a letter to his mother, to Gaza, and a chance to tell his own story as a Palestinian filmmaker against the narratives constructed by the Norwegian state bureaucracy. Life is Beautiful also documents the process of making Ambulance (2016), Jabaly’s breakthrough film that uses footage he captured while volunteering with an ambulance crew during the 2014 war in Gaza. “While editing,” the director muses in voiceover, “I stopped the missiles from falling on Gaza.” For Jabaly, making films is a way to come to terms with the limbo he finds himself in.

To a Land Unknown

For the millions of Palestinians living in a global diaspora, such limbo is a generational experience. The protagonists of Reel Palestine’s opening film, To A Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024), have swapped one exile for another. Cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) left their Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon to search for a better future in Germany. They find themselves stranded in Athens, the gateway for millions of refugees seeking entry into Europe, where they try to scrape together enough money to pay for forged passports. Chatila and Reda settle in the city’s dark underbelly, filled with petty crime and drugs, and pickpocket for cash. To A Land Unknown portrays Athens as a city emanating a nervous energy and latent danger. The capital is an in-between place, which speaks to the limbo refugees must wrestle with as they navigate Europe’s broken asylum system. “Here is just a stop-over,” Reda muses. “As Chatila says, this is not Europe. Look at the Greeks, they look like us Arabs.” The two men meet a young Palestinian boy, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), who was scammed by people smugglers, and think up a scheme to help him reach his aunt in Italy and make enough money to pay for their own passage to Germany. To A Land Unknown portrays the refugee experience without sugarcoating it. Ethical lines are routinely blurred in the cousins’ struggle to survive and make it out of the asylum system that has swallowed so many before them. Chatila and Reda have always been exiles, part of the thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Nakba. But as the Lebanese state does not grant Palestinians citizenship, the right to work or to own property, generations of Palestinians have remained displaced for decades, hanging on to the promise of the Right to Return. “Why did you leave Lebanon?” Malik asks Reda. “Lebanon is not our country, brother,” Reda replies. “Lebanon is like a prison. Like with you, in Gaza. You know, when you treat people like dogs, they start eating each other.” As he examines the harsh decisions Chatila and Reda must make to survive in the foreign turf, Fleifel never judges them; the line between good and bad is blurred as exploited become exploiters and desperation trumps morality. To A Land Unknown is deliberately ambiguous about the fate of its characters, thus reflecting the uncertainty of the migrant’s condition. As it was for Jabaly in Life is Beautiful, Chatila and Reda are Palestinians in exile victims of a system that has no time for their stories. 

The violence of borders is also a central theme of two standout shorts: 45th Parallel (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2022) and An Orange From Jaffa (Mohammed Almughanni, 2024), the former about the anomaly of free movement on the US-Canadian border, the latter about the normalization of unfree movement within a country. The setting and star of 45th Parallel is the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which sits on the border between the US and Canada and was founded in 1901 as a symbol of transnational friendship. For over a century, Canadians and Americans have been able to enter the library freely from their respective sides. Once inside, the border all but disappears, marked only by a thick black line that runs along the floor. Director Abu Hamdan described the library as a crack in the machinery of state sovereignty that throws into question the fictitious nature of borders. In 45th Parallel, the library becomes the setting for a monologue performed by To A Land Unknown’s director Mahdi Fleifel. Against the backdrop of the inter-jurisdictional opera house stage, Fleifel discusses the court case of a US border guard who shot a Mexican teenager from across the border in 2010, and the implications for the jurisdiction over the murders of thousands killed by US drone strikes. 45th Parallel poignantly demonstrates both the absurdity and lethalness of borders. Just like the fictional state boundaries become barriers for Jabaly in Life is Beautiful and Chatila and Reda in To A Land Unknown, the border that runs through the Haskell Free Library and Opera House becomes a literal and figurative theatre in which boundaries are performed and violently enforced. An Orange from Jaffa stages such performance to harrowing effect. Mohammed (Samer Bisharat), a Palestinian living in Poland with a residence permit, tries to join his mother on the other side of the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. The Israeli soldiers are refusing entry to all young men, so Mohammed flags down a taxi driven by Farouk (Kamel El Basha) to try his luck at the Hizma checkpoint instead. An Orange from Jaffa sheds light on the complex power dynamics between the two Palestinians as well as those between them and the Israeli soldiers. Farouk, a taxi driver, has a right to cross the checkpoints, while Mohammed lacks the right paperwork. But Farouk is stuck under the occupation, whereas Mohammed’s European residency grants him a way out. Both men must deal with the daily indignities and humiliation faced by Palestinians who simply try to move around their own country.

While many of the films at Reel Palestine showed the struggles of life under occupation, Palestinian cinema is also full of humour and tenderness. In Moatasem Taha’s short In The Waiting Room (2024), Hussein (Jalal Masarwa), a Palestinian researcher with Israeli citizenship, takes his newly widowed mother Rashida (Marleen Bajjali) to an Israeli hospital for a medical checkup. While Hussein struggles to find some privacy to finish an assignment, his mother, who has left the house for the first time since her husband’s passing, revels in the company she finds in the hospital waiting room. In her rusty Hebrew, her interactions become a humorous and tender bid for human connection. Unlike the films made in Gaza, in which shots of the Mediterranean were ubiquitous, the sea is an unreachable dream in the West Bank-set Palestine Islands (Nour Ben Salem and Julien Menanteau, 2023) and A Short Film About Kids (Ibrahim Handal, 2023). For Palestinians living in the landlocked territory, access to the sea is blocked by Israel’s 708 km-long wall. Aside from being a feature of the land they are barred from, the sea also symbolises the horizon and freedom denied to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. In A Short Film About Kids, four young boys from a Bethlehem refugee camp decide to plan a trip to the beach only to find themselves stuck at the physical and administrative borders that constrain their world. The protagonist of Palestine Islands, Maha (Sama Idreesi), a 12-year-old from the Balata refugee camp, is old enough to know about the limits to Palestinians’ movement. When her blind grandfather (Kamel El Basha) falls ill and expresses his wish to see the sea one last time, Maha hatches a scheme to make him believe that the Separation Wall has fallen and she can finally take him to see the Mediterranean. 

Upshot

The role of the sea in the collective memory of West Bank Palestinians, many of whom have never seen it, doubles as a reminder of the power of storytelling. In Maha Haj’s short, Upshot (2024), an elderly couple (Mohammed Bakri and Areen Omari) lives alone on an isolated farm. In between chores, husband and wife bicker about their children, discuss when they will come to visit, and argue over how their lives have turned out. Yet the hauntingly beautiful landscapes and cinematographer Augustin Bonnet’s excellent use of light and shadow suggest that something is not right. The autumn countryside is almost too calm, and the long shots of the couple moving through their daily routine in silence suggest things left unsaid. When a journalist (Amer Hlehel) shows up unbidden to inquire about the couple’s past, it becomes clear that all the family anecdotes are invented – a way of coping with the fact that their children were killed decades prior. Storytelling thus becomes a way to contend with the devastating memories of loss and to forge a sense of intimacy, as the couple invites the stranger to dinner and readily addresses him as their son’s friend. While in Upshot storytelling serves as a means to cope with painful memories, Khaled and Nema (Sohail Dahdal, 2024) shows the power of stories to reclaim and preserve them. When the Israeli army threatens to demolish his village, Khaled (Oday Al-Saeedi), a Bedouin boy accompanied by his goat Nema, embarks on a mission to restore the memories of Abu Maryam (Mohammed Bakri), the village hero who had protected the community in his prime but now suffers from dementia, by collecting stories of those bygone days from the villagers. Dahdal, whose background is in documentary filmmaking, shot the film over four days in a village in the Jericho area that had already been demolished five times. The story of a boy and his goat unfurls against the threat of displacement and dispossession Bedouin communities face on a daily basis. Highlighting the commingling of land and memory in Palestine, Khaled and Nema is a powerful portrayal of how stories are passed down through generations as a means of resistance against erasure. 

All combined, the films at Reel Palestine painted a multifaceted picture of life across Palestine and the diaspora. Above all, they asserted the Palestinian people’s humanity and resilience, and sought to debunk and reclaim narratives that have all too often obscured ordinary Palestinian voices. Addressing the audience at the festival’s opening night, Cinema Akil founder Butheina Kazim summed up the importance of platforming Palestinian stories. “If we don’t tell our stories, support them, and ensure they’re told, made, and shown, no one will,” she said. “Cinema wields an unmatched power of resistance.”

Reel Palestine
24 January – 2 February 2025
http://www.reelpalestine.org/

Endnotes