Filming Internationalism: Palestine, Another Vietnam and the Transnational Imaginaries of Third World Cinema

Introduction

Palestinian cinema began to take shape as a national project in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in close connection with broader movements of Third World Cinema. Within this framework, it shared a militant and decolonising aesthetic with political cinemas emerging in Latin America, marked by the search for new forms of representation rooted in struggles for national liberation.

After the 1948 war, in which the Indigenous population of Palestine was massacred and expelled from its homeland, known in Arabic as the nakba (the catastrophe), Palestinians found themselves in a state of profound dispossession. In the following decade, the idea of forging a distinct Palestinian political entity began to take shape both in the rhetoric of regional leaders and among Palestinians themselves. Following the popular resistance to the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1956, a group of Palestinians living in the Gulf states founded Fatah, an organisation independent of Arab governments and political parties. Its ideology was simple yet compelling: Palestinians themselves should take charge of the struggle to liberate their land and demand the return of refugees.

In 1964, under pressure from both Arab leadership and the emerging Palestinian cadres, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established as an umbrella organisation that brought together existing factions and soon became recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In this constellation, culture and media were central terrains on which the new national subject would be imagined, addressed, and represented.

During these early years, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) played a crucial role in shaping the first international visual representations of Palestinians. They were portrayed as anonymous victims through photographs appealing to humanitarian compassion, framed within a visual logic characteristic of European liberal imperialism. Although such images served institutional purposes – fundraising, public awareness – they also functioned as material proof of Palestinian existence in the face of Zionist erasure. Yet Palestinians had very little control over these visual narratives until, after the 1967 war and the reorganisation of the PLO under the leadership of militant groups, a shift began to take place (Yaqub, 2023).

Different political factions developed their own media as tools for asserting an emancipated collective identity and establishing connections with other revolutionary movements. Art and film became fundamental political practices to contest dominant narratives and reclaim symbolic agency within the anticolonial struggle. As I argue in this article, Palestine, Another Vietnam must be understood within this wider project – but also as a specific, gendered articulation of it.

Palestine, Another Vietnam

Revolutionary Palestinian Cinema and Third World Imaginaries

The founding of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) in 1968 under the auspices of Fatah marked a turning point in Palestinian visual culture. Established by Mustafa Abu Ali, Sulafa Jadallah, and Hani Jawharieh, and fuelled by the renewed momentum of the Palestinian Revolution after the Battle of al-Karameh, the PFU began filming the everyday lives of refugees and the military activities unfolding in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In 1969 the PFU produced its first film, No to a Peaceful Solution, on Palestinian reactions to the Rogers Plan. The following year, it documented the clashes between Palestinian militias and the Jordanian army that preceded the massacres in the refugee camps – events later known as Black September (Habashneh, 2023).

After these events, in July 1971, the Palestinian leadership and the PFU relocated to Beirut, energising the vibrant cultural and political movement that turned the Lebanese capital into a major hub of Arab artistic and intellectual life. There, PFU and other film organisations linked to various factions fostered the development of an alternative cinema in a region long dominated by the Egyptian industry.

Mustafa Abu Ali and his wife, Khadijeh Habashneh – who held a prominent role in Fatah’s Women’s Political Organisation – also travelled to Beirut, where she directed some of the earliest Palestinian documentaries made by a woman. She recalls her experience as follows:

It was the first time for the crew to hear notes and orders from a woman directing the film. I felt some of them were not at ease, for example, when I called for a meeting for next day’s preparation, like what’s our plan, how many negative cans we need, and batteries to be charged…etc. some of them used to say, yes…yes we know what to do. I also remember when I won the prize of the Jury of the Baghdad International Festival for films on Palestine, March 1980. I felt furious when they mentioned the word woman while announcing the prize, and I declared, I refuse to take the prize if it’s for me as a woman. When the head of the jury had to take the mic and say: The jury gave the prize because the film is good and deserved the prize, but we felt it’s good to mention that it’s the first Palestinian film made by a woman filmmaker. I think this accident happened because I was sensitive to the issue. (Interview with the author, 2024). 

Her account captures not only the everyday gendered frictions within the PFU but also an early, sharp awareness of how revolutionary cultural institutions continued to reproduce patriarchal logic, even as they articulated anti-colonial ideals. What emerges from her testimony is a contradiction emblematic of the period: women were indispensable to the political and cinematic labour of the revolution yet remained symbolically marginal within its narratives of heroism and artistic authority.

The dynamics she identifies; women occupying central roles in the struggle while being excluded from its representational order, reappear across the testimonies of multiple generations of Palestinian militants and cultural workers. Habashneh’s reflections thus serve as a crucial point of entry into a broader constellation of experiences that illuminate how Palestinian women negotiated, challenged, and frequently subverted the gendered boundaries that sought to circumscribe their political participation.

Throughout the early years of revolutionary Palestinian cinema, film production was marked by a militant, collective, and transnational structure. Many Arab directors found in the PLO a space of creative and political refuge, especially those who could not film freely in their countries due to state censorship. In contexts such as Syria and Egypt, where state apparatuses controlled scripts, shoots, and editing, experimentation was severely restricted. In this landscape, Palestinian cinema positioned itself transversally between emerging public film institutions and international solidarity networks, fostering coproduction experiences that exceeded national frameworks and articulated a shared aesthetics and politics of liberation (Yaqub, 2018).

Palestine, Another Vietnam

Members of PLO-linked film institutions often emphasised that the number of Palestinian filmmakers was limited (only 11 technicians were actively working in Beirut) yet this was not perceived as an obstacle. Instead, the movement promoted a collaborative ethos in which individual authorship was subordinated to the collective project. Names such as Mustafa Abu Ali appeared repeatedly in credits not only for creative contributions but also for organisational roles within the institutional framework.

There was likewise no rigid separation between films made by Palestinian directors and those produced by sympathetic Arab or international filmmakers, so long as the latter fully integrated themselves into the Palestinian political and cultural project (Hennebelle, Le Péron and Cheriaa, 1972). In this sense, solidarity cinema was not merely “about” Palestine; it was expected to be structurally and institutionally embedded in revolutionary practice.

Cinematic work did not consist solely of producing films. Distribution was conceived as a central dimension of the project. “Militant distribution” was especially active from 1968 onwards in Jordan, where screenings were organised in villages, refugee camps, and among Bedouin communities. The repertoire included films from Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, and China – political cinemas aligned with national liberation struggles.

After the repression of 1970 and the loss of equipment, distribution continued on a smaller scale, but with new strategies: at the end of screenings, mimeographed questionnaires were distributed to collect audience reactions. This practice sought to generate genuine dialogue with viewers and to adapt content to their experiences and needs, in clear opposition to commercial cinema imposed by colonial or neocolonial structures. One of the most significant achievements of these experiences was that Palestinians could see themselves represented on screen, generating a feeling of recognition and dignity after decades of systematic erasure.

In this sense, the aim of cinema was to accompany and strengthen the historical process of the Palestinian people, becoming a pedagogical, emotional, and political tool (Hennebelle, Le Péron and Cheriaa, 1972). Cinema, in other words, was conceived as a practice of political pedagogy and affective mobilisation.

Revolutionary cinema was thus oriented toward confronting imperialism in all its forms – military, economic, and cultural. Within this framework, filmmakers emphasised the need to build alliances among Third World film movements and articulate a decolonising aesthetics capable of challenging Western cultural hegemony. The goal was to promote a popular cinema through which the masses could recognise themselves as historical subjects rather than mere objects of representation.

This vision was articulated in the Manifesto of the Palestinian Cinema Group, published in Beirut in 1972 by filmmakers and intellectuals associated with the PLO Research Center. The text offers a radical critique of commercial Arab cinema and calls for a militant, collective, and decolonising cinema in the service of the revolution. Against the dominant aesthetic of escapism, the group proposed a practice aligned with political content, capable of documenting the struggle, mobilising the masses, and forging international alliances (Dickinson, 2018).

It is within this dense network of institutions, manifestos, and practices – and within the gendered tensions exemplified by Habashneh’s trajectory – that Palestine, Another Vietnam must be situated. The film is both a product of this revolutionary culture and a transnational contribution that introduces particular questions about gender, authorship, and the limits of representation.

Palestine, Another Vietnam

Transnational Solidarity and the C3M: From May ’68 to Beirut

The emancipatory project of the Palestinian Revolution attracted not only Arab filmmakers but also artists and militants from Latin America, Europe, and Asia. PLO film productions and the films of visiting directors created new forms of visibility for the cause, embedding it within global liberation movements. As Nadia Yaqub notes, such films “contributed to the very construction of the revolution by portraying it precisely as a revolution” (2018: 3).

Internationalist filmmakers travelled to Jordan and Lebanon to witness revolutionary activities firsthand. Many produced documentaries that disseminated political aims and documented armed struggle. A few exceptional cases, however, moved beyond didactic documentation to engage critically with the conditions of possibility for Third World political cinema itself. These include Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, as well as Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu. In 1970, Fatah – funded by the Arab League – commissioned Godard and Gorin to produce a film titled Until Victory, which was left unfinished due to the outbreak of civil war in Jordan but whose footage was later reused in Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville. For their part, Adachi and Wakamatsu visited the region under the auspices of the PFLP, resulting in The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971).

In this same vein, though with far fewer resources, emerged the project of the Third World Cinema Collective (C3M), composed of Jorge Denti, Jorge Giannoni, Manuela Generali, and Beppe Scavuzzo. Without institutional or financial backing,¹ they undertook an overland journey in a van they named masha’allah (“as God willed it”), crossing Eastern Europe and Turkey until reaching Lebanon. There, amid revolutionary fervour and at the height of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, they filmed what would later become Palestine, Another Vietnam.

Their trajectory cannot be separated from the broader context of revolutionary diplomacy and networks of solidarity built by Palestinian factions – particularly Fatah – in Europe and the Global South. In France, for instance, the Palestinian cause became a key point of articulation for the post-1968 radical left, facilitated by structures inherited from the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) (Mamarbachi, 2020). 

Within this atmosphere, exiled Argentinian filmmaker Jorge Denti and his partner, Swiss visual artist Manuela Generali, participated in the political and artistic movement that emerged from May ’68 in France, where figures like Alain Geismar played prominent roles. Denti was involved in the occupation of the Casa Argentina in Paris, protesting the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía and in solidarity with student struggles. By 1969, both Denti and Generali were disillusioned by the waning of the previous year’s upheaval and began to look elsewhere.

Jorge Denti in Beirut – Mariano Mestman’s Archive

They turned toward the Palestinian Revolution, made contact with Palestinian militants in Paris, and started to imagine a film. As Generali recalls, even before seriously considering travelling, she had already begun studying Arabic, and, as a feminist, was very interested in the role of women in Third World struggles: “I always rejected the idea of Europe. ’68 was fantastic but ’69 a disappointment. We started reading about what was happening in Palestine and wondering if women were taking part in that revolution,” she told me in an interview (Generali, interview with the author, 2020).

Driven by the need to find a new axis for their political and aesthetic pursuits, Denti persuaded his friend Jorge Giannoni – his collaborator on Molotov Party in London – to join a project that would place the camera “on the side of ongoing revolutions.” Both shared a diagnosis of the limits of European mobilisations: “We realised that we would not find the reasons for genuine change at the centre of the developed world, but rather in its peripheries, in poor countries or in those undergoing a revolution” (Giannoni, 1974: 42).

Their decision to work in Palestine thus emerged from a particular imaginary of revolution: the periphery as the site of authenticity, radicality, and historical movement. Crucially, this imaginary was also gendered. As we will see, the desire to film Palestinian women in struggle would both enable and complicate their project.

The C3M arrived in Beirut in 1971, at a moment when the city was consolidating its role as cultural and political capital of the Arab world, embodying multiple faces: pan-Arab intellectual centre, city of spectacle, site of revolutionary organisation. Modernising aspirations and revolutionary ferment converged in Beirut as a tense political and cultural epicentre.

Its nightlife, proliferation of cinemas and publishing houses, literary cafés, and urban middle classes transformed local sociabilities. Beirut attracted intellectuals such as Ghassan Kanafani, a key figure of revolutionary Palestinian culture, who made the city his political and literary platform as spokesperson for the PFLP and editor of al-Hadaf. It also functioned as a meeting place for conflicting ideological currents and as a refuge for filmmakers and intellectuals persecuted by censorship elsewhere.

Beirut’s appeal was not only due to relative freedom of the press and educational institutions, but also to its integration into regional financial and oil networks, which stimulated tourism and construction, particularly for Gulf elites. Yet this modernity coexisted with precarious public services, intricate political intrigue, and intense intelligence activity. Beirut thus embodied a paradox: its complexity produced an urban myth that attracted Arabs, Europeans, and Americans alike (Kassir, 2010).

It was in this contradictory setting that, for nearly a year, Manuela, “Jorge One,” and “Jorge Two” – as they were nicknamed by their hosts – lived and worked alongside Palestinian militants. They were taken in by Mustafa Abu Ali and Khadijeh Habashneh. As Habashneh recounted:

My husband, Mustafa Abu Ali, invited them not only to eat but also to stay with us in our home for a few days while they were in Beirut. I had arrived just a few days earlier from Amman, after resigning from my job there in order to join my husband and the revolution in Lebanon. I was fascinated to meet revolutionaries from Latin America and very interested in learning about the Tupamaros. I spoke to them about the role of women in the revolution, although I did not move around with them during their journey. […] At that time we were working on reorganising the Political Organisation of Women within al-Fatah and on reconstituting the General Union of Palestinian Women in the refugee camps and popular neighbourhoods. […] As I recall, the group was interested in making a film about the Palestinian revolution in general, but they also showed a particular interest in the role of women in the struggle. (Habashneh, interview with the author, 2024)

According to Generali, their stay with the Palestinian couple lasted almost a year, until they were suddenly told that their protection could no longer be guaranteed and they had to leave immediately. They departed that same day, transporting the filmed material overland to Europe. There they received assistance from Enzo Rossellini and San Diego Cinematografica, which financed editing and post-production.

Palestine, Another Vietnam

The completed film was narrated in English by filmmaker Giuseppe Vaporetto and by an unnamed “Palestinian woman, a comrade.” This absence of attribution does not appear accidental. When I asked Manuela Generali whether she knew the identity of the woman, she explained that she could not help: during post-production she had largely stayed away from the studio because she was pregnant and wished to avoid the heavy cigarette smoke (Generali, personal communication with the author, November 2025). These two erasures – treated as natural by both Denti and Generali – echo the orientalist assumptions that also shaped the project. In our interview, when I asked Manuela several times how she navigated such a male-dominated world (referring to her own filmmaking environment), she assumed I meant the Arab context and repeatedly redirected the conversation there. Moreover, in a 1996 interview, Denti remarked that he recalled having long conversations with Palestinians but could not remember how, since they did not speak Arabic; in reality, as Manuela told me, “they half-used me, because I am Swiss and speak many languages; and before we travelled, I had already begun studying Arabic” (interview with the author, 2020).

The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Baghdad International Festival of Film and Television in 1973. A Spanish-language version was screened in Buenos Aires at the Conference of the Third World Cinema Committee in 1974 and later in several Argentine cinemas; by then, Giannoni – recently returned from exile – was directing the film library of the short-lived Instituto del Tercer Mundo “Manuel Ugarte” at the University of Buenos Aires.

2nd Meeting of the Third World Cinema Committee – Mariano Mestman’s Archive

The trajectory of Palestine, Another Vietnam thus maps not only a geography of revolutionary circuits (Beirut-Paris-Buenos Aires) but also a circulation of gendered imaginaries: Palestinian women as figures of revolutionary authenticity; Latin American and European militants as witnesses and interlocutors; and cinema as the medium that stitches together these asymmetrical positions – unevenly and often incompletely. This transnational and gendered constellation forms the necessary foundation for examining the film’s formal strategies, rhetorical construction, and its complex negotiation of female revolutionary subjectivity.

Palestine, Another Vietnam: Form, Rhetoric, and Gendered Imaginaries

Despite its brief running time – barely 22 minutes – Palestine, Another Vietnam condenses, in a revealing way, C3M’s perception and political positioning regarding the Palestinian struggle. Its force lies not only in the events depicted and the Maoist rhetoric structuring the voice-over, but also in the extended period that the filmmakers spent living alongside refugees, militants, and cultural cadres.

This proximity was also material. As Denti recalls, “Throughout the shooting, we had virtually no money. This obliged us to strictly ration our resources, to the extent that we had a limited and poor diets. But I think such circumstances maybe also helped us understand, almost intimately, the daily life of the most humble and impoverished parts of the Palestinian population. Our main “habitat” while filming was the van we used to move around…One of the issues we faced during the production was that secret services of various origins and with diverse intentions seemed keenly interested in following our movements.” (Denti, 2014). 

Within this framework, Palestine, Another Vietnam stands out as a singular work of internationalist cinema, combining original footage with PFU archive material and articulating a decolonising narrative that places particular emphasis on women’s roles. The chosen title alludes to Che Guevara’s (1965) call to “create two, three, many Vietnams,” situating Palestine in continuity with other liberation movements and foregrounding its anti-imperialist character.

The film opens with archival images of Palestinian culture: a tranquil black-and-white scene with oud music and women carrying oranges, abruptly interrupted by air raids. A red intertitle announces “Aggression, June 1967 war,” introducing images of the wounded, displaced, and orphaned, contrasted with scenes of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir laughing. The voice-over soon asserts that “after the aggression of 1967 the only resistance to Israeli aggression was carried out by the Palestinians,” marking the end of reliance on Arab states and the emergence of an autonomous Palestinian movement.

A substantial portion of the film is devoted to scenes of mass demonstrations and military training in Lebanon and Syria. Placards from a variety of organisations (Palestine Liberation Front, Union of Progressive Palestinian Youth, Ba’ath Party cells, student unions) testify to a broad mobilisation that exceeds the framework of Palestinian factions such as Fatah or the PFLP. Pan-Arab imagery persists through banners featuring Gamal Abdel Nasser and slogans celebrating “all the revolutionaries of the Arab nation.” The funeral of Abu Ali Iyad in Damascus becomes a key sequence that condenses these interwoven imaginaries of martyrdom, Arab unity, and anti-imperialism.

This rhetoric is echoed in contemporaneous works such as Heiny Srour’s The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), which similarly denounces Arab complicity; Srour does not hesitate to call King Hussein “the butcher of the Palestinian people.” In Palestine, Another Vietnam, Black September survivors denounce the Jordanian army for bombing, rather than assisting, the wounded.

What distinguishes Palestine, Another Vietnam from many other solidarity films of the period is the place it grants to women, both as figures in the image and as subjects of the voice-over. From minute 15 onwards, a female narrator stresses that:

“The Palestinian woman is realizing more and more of her necessity to be revolutionary. The traditions and economic structures of Arab society have put her in a position of inferiority and taken away from her any possibility of self-determination. In the struggle, she becomes self-confident. In the people’s war, the participation of the Palestinian woman cannot be sidelined. Without her there will be no victory”.

These words accompany images of young seamstresses working in a Fatah workshop and of girls training alongside boys, intercut with older women chanting in demonstrations. The cross-generational montage projects an imaginary of women crossing from domestic labour to armed struggle, from spectatorship to participation.

Yet this feminist impulse remains only partially fulfilled. As Manuela Generali recalls, her position as a foreign sound technician allowed her to enter spaces often closed to male militants and cameramen: “I could enter homes, field hospitals, places where the wounded were. I could speak more easily with women,” (Generali, interview with the author, 2020). Her presence thus enabled access to intimate spaces and bodies otherwise off-limits. However, these encounters do not fully translate into the film in the form of sustained female testimonies.

Palestine, Another Vietnam

In a later exchange, after viewing the film and a fragment of my interview with Generali, Khadijeh Habashneh pointed out that the only female spoken testimony in Palestine, Another Vietnam comes from fighter Ihsan Barnawi. She found this revealing of how difficult it was to systematically incorporate women’s voices into audiovisual records of the time, despite C3M’s initial desire to place women at the centre of the narrative. For Habashneh, this limitation cannot simply be attributed to the filmmakers’ intentions, but must be read against the broader social and political landscape:

I think Manuela was shocked by the condition of traditional working-class women, compared to the situation of Swiss women or even Latin American women. Palestinians lived under very difficult economic and political conditions, as refugees under the repressive power of the Lebanese police. Palestinians were not allowed to work in almost 90% of jobs; they usually worked only as undocumented labour, for very low wages. I do not blame Manuela: how could she possibly grasp all the hardships reflected in the social condition of Palestinian women, added to the effects of the Arab-Islamic legacy in Arab countries under Turkish/Ottoman Islamic authority for hundreds of years, before the colonial partition imposed by British and French colonialism? But if Manuela had come in the second half of the 1970s, after Palestinian refugees had integrated into the armed struggle alongside the PLO, she would have encountered a very different situation for women. Many political, economic, and social changes were beginning to emerge, similar to those already occurring among Palestinian women in Jordan in the late 1960s. (Habashneh, interview with the author, 2024)

Habashneh’s remarks highlight the temporal and structural nature of the film’s gendered blind spots. Palestine, Another Vietnam captures a moment in which women’s participation was already central but still struggled to find representation beyond emblematic roles.² The film oscillates between gestures toward a feminist internationalism (women training, sewing uniforms, caring for the wounded) and the persistence of male-centred narrative structures.

Reading Palestine, Another Vietnam through the lens of gender allows us to reframe the film as a site of productive tension rather than as a straightforward example of revolutionary solidarity. On the one hand, the film participates in the construction of a transnational imaginary of “the Palestinian woman fighter” – a figure that resonated in Latin American radical culture and echoed visual iconographies associated with Vietnamese, Algerian, and Cuban women militants. On the other hand, its partial occlusion of women’s voices and subjectivities points to the limits of militant cinema’s capacity to fully register the complexity of gendered experiences.

The presence of Manuela Generali is crucial here. As a European woman embedded in a Palestinian revolutionary context, her trajectory complicates simple binaries between “Western” and “Third World” feminisms. Her account of being shocked by the conditions of working-class Palestinian women, combined with her desire to understand whether women were participating in the Revolution, reflects both genuine solidarity and the risk of projecting Eurocentric expectations onto very different social realities.³

The film’s final form bears trace of these negotiations. While the editing and voice-over foreground women’s participation and insist on the impossibility of victory without them, the scarcity of direct female testimonies reveals the persistence of patriarchal structures within both the movement and the cinematic apparatus. As Habashneh notes, it was simply very difficult to systematically integrate women’s voices, especially those of popular sectors insulated by class, gender, and refugee status.

At the same time, revisiting Palestine, Another Vietnam alongside later works by Arab women filmmakers – Jocelyne Saab’s Les femmes palestiniennes (The Palestinian Women, 1974), Nabiha Lotfy’s L’inna el judur lan temut (Because the Roots Never Die, 1977), Heiny Srour’s Leila w-al-adiab (Leila and the Wolves, 1984), Mai Masri’s documentaries on imprisoned women, or Arab Lutfy’s Ehky ya asfura (Tell Your Tale, Little Bird, 1993) – allows us to situate C3M’s film within a longer genealogy of feminist interventions that explicitly challenged nationalist narratives for their marginalisation of women. In this genealogy, Palestine, Another Vietnam appears as an early, incomplete attempt to register women’s centrality in the Revolution from a transnational perspective.

Concluding Remarks

Palestine, Another Vietnam constitutes an exceptional testimony to the interweaving of art and revolution. It not only documents a crucial moment in the Palestinian struggle but also embodies a mode of filmmaking grounded in political commitment, material precariousness, and transnational collaboration. The experience of the C3M – marked by learning in the field, living alongside militants, and developing a sensitive, if sometimes conflicted, gaze – invites us to understand the film not as an external representation but as a form of active participation in the revolutionary process.

From a gendered perspective, the film’s significance lies as much in what it represents as in what it elides. Its images of women training, sewing, and marching, and its assertion that “without [women’s participation], there will be no victory,” anticipate later feminist critiques of nationalist movements that instrumentalised women’s labour while limiting their political agency. Yet the minimal space granted to women’s voices – despite Manuela Generali’s stated intentions – reveals the structural challenges of inscribing gendered experiences within a militant cinema still organised around male leadership, revolutionary masculinity, and heroic narratives. The gap between the centrality of women’s participation and their marginality within the representational order becomes, in this sense, one of the film’s most telling features.

Revisiting Palestine, Another Vietnam today is therefore not a purely archival exercise. At a time when the population of Gaza – after nearly two years of devastation – continues to face a genocidal offensive by the State of Israel marked by mass civilian casualties, attacks on health and humanitarian infrastructure, and deliberate starvation, the persistent silence or equivocation of much of the global cultural and political field becomes increasingly untenable. Under such circumstances, returning to earlier forms of solidarity cinema allows us not only to recognise their historical contribution but also to interrogate their limits, omissions, and unresolved tensions.

In the present moment, when Palestinian artists and filmmakers are once again calling for global solidarity, and when archives of earlier revolutionary cinema are being rediscovered, digitised, and restored, Palestine, Another Vietnam offers a crucial point of reference. It prompts us to consider how transnational militant cinema might foreground women’s experiences not merely as symbols of sacrifice or courage but as complex political subjects; how it might avoid reproducing hierarchies of speaking, seeing, and interpreting; and how cinematic images, rather than simply bearing witness, might reclaim their capacity to intervene in history, reconfigure political imaginaries, and sustain forms of resistance.

References

• Jorge Denti, “Jorge Denti Remembers Palestine, Another Vietnam, 1971,” in The World Is with Us (London: Palestine Film Foundation, 2014), p. 13.
• Kay Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
• Ernesto Guevara, El hombre nuevo (Mexico City: UNAM, 1965).
• Khadijeh Habashneh, Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
• Guy Hennebelle, Serge Le Péron and Tahar Cheriaa, conversation with members of the Palestinian Film Institution in Beirut, 1972, fragment published in The World Is with Us (London: Palestine Film Foundation, 2014), p. 11.
• Gabriela Jaime, Jorge Giannoni, NN ese soy yo (Documentary, Grupo de Boedo Films, 1996).
• “Jorge Giannoni: El Tercer Cine,” Revista Panorama, 9 May 1974, pp. 42–43.
• Samir Kassir, Beirut (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
• Alexandre Mamarbachi, “Emergence, construction et transformations d’une ‘cause’: sociologie historique des dévouements en faveur de la ‘cause’ des Palestiniens 1960–2010,” (PhD diss., Université de Nanterre–Paris X, 2020).
• Heiny Srour, “L’image de la femme palestinienne,” in Guy Hennebelle and Khayati Khayati, eds., La Palestine et le cinéma (Paris: F100, 1977).
• Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).
• Nadia Yaqub, Gaza on Screen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).

Personal Interviews

• Manuela Generali, interview by the author, Zoom, 23 March 2020; email correspondence, August-November 2025.
• Heiny Srour, interview by the author, Zoom, 4 February 2022.
• Khadijeh Habashneh, interview by the author, email, March 2024.

Endnotes