The Tokyo Reels: Fragments of Resistance and Solidarity in Palestinian Cinema

“Everything in this world can be robbed and stolen, except one thing; this one thing is the love that emanates from a human being towards a solid commitment to a conviction or cause.”
Ghassan Kanafani

Introduction

For 471 days, the Israeli aggression against Gaza left no life untouched. According to a January 22 report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), published on January 22, three days after the ceasefire took effect, at least 47,161 Palestinians had been killed, with another 111,166 injured.¹ Amid the sheer scale of destruction – the displacement of over two million people, and the systematic targeting of Gaza’s cultural and urban heritage – the genocide stands as latest iteration of Israel’s colonial imaginary set in action: robbing the Palestinian people of their history and supplanting it with a narrative that serves the interests of colonial settlement, rooted in elimination and domination.²

Yet Gaza resists. Its people continue to demonstrate unparalleled steadfastness; one that the neoliberal world order, with its diluted and depoliticised conception of solidarity, struggles to comprehend. Against this backdrop, activists, writers, historians, academics, and artists committed to the liberation of Palestine have fought this erasure. They document the history of the resistance, trace its evolving strategies responding to ever-changing internal and external pressures, and reaffirm its commitment to liberation by unearthing, preserving, and studying its cultural output. 

In this regard, the period between 1965 and 1982 marks a critical chapter in the history of the Palestinian national movement, characterised by revolutionary transformations and devastating setbacks. This era witnessed a substantial shift towards organised armed resistance as the primary strategy for reclaiming a Palestinian national identity – a strategy inspired by, and simultaneously modelling global anti-colonial movements in Algeria, Vietnam, and Latin America. By 1974, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), then operating in and from Lebanon, had established itself as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and developed a solid network of political and educational institutions, social services, and cultural and media organisations to serve and mobilise Palestinian refugees.

However, these gains were undermined by the PLO’s involvement in the Lebanese civil war and the subsequent Israeli invasion of 1982, events that ultimately prompted a shift away from armed struggle. Compounding this decline, as scholars have pointed out, the Israeli invasion led to the dispersal and destruction of archival materials, leaving much of the revolutionary movement’s cultural production inaccessible or lost entirely.³ A decade later, the Oslo era, marked by a shift toward state-building and negotiations with Israel, also saw the deliberate marginalisation of narratives centred on armed resistance and revolutionary struggle, now deemed incompatible with the new political framework through which the Palestinian Authority was pursuing international legitimacy and economic support. For generations of young Palestinians coming of age in the post-Oslo era, the militant cinema – along with the broader cultural production of this period, with its unflinching documentation of struggle, bold visual language, and solidarity networks – remained largely unregistered, absent from collective memory. It is this cinematic archive, and the acts of reanimation it demands, that this article seeks to illuminate.

Archival Encounters

In fact, as my research interests have developed through the years, I’ve been highly conscious that my initial encounter with the Palestinian film archive of this period came during what I now recognise as a profoundly transformative personal – yet privileged – experience. In 2014, during my final undergraduate semester at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, my advisor, artist and professor Oraib Toukan, introduced me to filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi from the research collective Subversive Film. At the time, Yaqubi was working on an archival documentary that engages with Palestinian revolutionary cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s and needed assistance translating and subtitling hours of archival footage and interviews conducted during research. In this documentary, titled Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (2016), Yaqubi investigates traces of the PLO’s looted film archive, exploring the “constitutive role of image making for both developing revolutionary consciousness and expanding a broad militant front that forcefully opposed Israel’s settler colonial project.”⁴ Little did I know then how influential that meeting would be, setting me on a journey full of unexpected turns and revelations, and shaping the course of my academic research.

Founded in 2011, Subversive Film is among many research groups (and individuals) investigating traces and remnants of Beirut’s lost archive. As Nadia Yaqub points out in Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, while the main archive of films that PLO filmmakers had put together since the 1960s was destroyed – and probably looted – during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, copies of these films made their way out of Beirut before the invasion.⁵ According to Yaqub, the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI), among other organisations, printed dozens of copies of these films, sent them to PLO offices around the world, and distributed them to allies and film festivals.⁶ Since the early 2000s, there have been numerous efforts to recreate this archive by gathering and digitising the scattered copies of these films from places such as Italy and Germany, and different personal collections in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. 

Working on Off Frame, I was immediately inspired by Subversive Film’s ethos and archival methodologies, which emphasise bringing the cinema of the revolution back into circulation. The group’s emphasis on these imperfect archives (fragmented, transnational collections of struggles that resist fixed narratives) has ignited a profound sense of curiosity combined with a sense of urgency to understand this obscure chapter of our history. I have approached it both as a historical narrative and as a testament to the power of the image in preserving collective memory. It is from this intersection of personal discovery and scholarly inquiry that my interest in working with Subversive Film as a researcher emerged, driven by a commitment to broaden access to these histories and the steadfastness embedded within the story of the Palestinian film archive.

 The Reels

In this article, I explore the main project I worked on with Subversive Film, which revolves around an archive of twenty films entrusted to the collective in 2017. Mohanad Yaqubi had first encountered the collection during a trip to screen Off Frame in Tokyo, Japan. After the screening at the Image Forum theatre in Shibuya, Yaqubi was approached by Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Hiroshima City University, Aoe Tanami, who invited him to look at a small archive related to the Palestinian struggle. The contents of this archive have been collected by a Japanese Palestine solidarity group that was active throughout the 1970s and early 80s and had strong ties with the PLO representative office in Tokyo, which opened its doors in 1977 and seems to have housed parts of the material until its subsequent closure in 1995. Since then, the collection has been safeguarded by members of the solidarity group in the basement of a traditional Japanese house in the outskirts of Tokyo. Its contents included film reels, news articles, books, posters, and documents, among other objects. In its totality, the collection sheds light on another obscured history: that of the solidarity between Japan and Palestine. It offers an intimate perspective into the 1970s anti-imperialist spirit, its global dimension, tying two distant corners of Asia through shared struggle.

In 2019, the Japanese group entrusted Subversive Film with the film reels, allowing those of us close to the group the opportunity to engage with this material. This laid the groundwork for the collaborative multi-year research project, ‘For an Imperfect Archive: Tokyo Reels’ in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium, which offered its labs for safe-keeping, scanning, and digitising of the films. The first step was to fully grasp what these films are and who made them. When the two first met, Professor Aoe Tanami provided Yaqubi with a list of films in Japanese, with the latter acknowledging that many were unfamiliar to him.  The canisters that held the reels also provided more -albeit fragmentary- clues: some bore only the titles scribbled in Japanese, while others included an insert card listing the film’s title, director, production organisation, and distributor, alternately in Japanese or English (or both). Thus, while the 16mm films were being scanned and digitised at the KASK film lab, we began working on a centralised directory to access and add all the available information about these films. Eventually, we created a set of catalogues for each of the films, which I return to in the epilogue.  Altogether, the collection comprises twenty films spanning genres, geographies, and political contexts, offering a rich tapestry of Palestinian cultural and political expression – their very circulation grounded in internationalist solidarity. The films were produced between 1964 and 1983 by filmmakers from Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. They range from informational documentaries and touristic and institutional films, through experimental and essay films concerned with Hollywood’s entanglements with American imperialism, to political films directly engaged in the struggle.

The Tokyo Reels

The tourist and institutional films include Welcome to Jordan (Tom Hollyman, 1964), Temptation to Return (Victor Haddad, 1966), and Masrah al-‘amal (The Stage of Hope, Khaled Siddik, 1969). Although not directly concerned with the Palestinian cause, these films were commissioned by the governments of Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait, respectively, reflecting the political and cultural priorities of the newly independent Arab nations in the mid-twentieth century. Welcome to Jordan promotes tourism in the nascent Hashemite Kingdom, highlighting its modernity and progress.  At the same time, the film reinforces the Jordanian state’s political ambitions by asserting a claim over the West Bank and Jerusalem – territories unilaterally annexed in 1950. The act was considered unlawful under international law, with most nations viewing Jordan as an interim trustee until a final resolution could be reached.⁷ Temptation to Return takes the viewer on a journey through Iraq’s cultural and historical sites. With a captivating narration written by the esteemed Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, whose new reading of Arab history connects Iraq’s ancient past to its modern present, the film announces the country’s readiness to welcome tourists and guests in the post-independence era. Similarly, The Stage of Hope serves as a testament to the progressive modernisation of Kuwait by documenting the elaborate inauguration of the Compound of Special Needs Institute, a state-funded initiative designed to provide an inclusive educational environment for students with disabilities. To this day, the compound offers tailored academic, rehabilitative, medical, and social services to foster their integration into society, aligning with Kuwait’s development vision. Together, these films offer a glimpse into the aspirations of Arab nations during a period of transition, emphasising development, cultural pride, and assertions of national identity.

Another group comprises the humanitarian gaze films. It includes Kuneitra: Death of a City (Jim Cranmer, 1974), Beyond the War (Samir Hissen, 1977), and Lebanon 1982: UNRWA Emergency Operation (1982). These films focus on documenting the humanitarian crises of displacement and war, often through the perspective of international aid organisations. Beyond the War documents the response of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to the Six-Day War, focusing on the plight of refugees crossing from the West Bank to Jordan. Lebanon 1982 documents the Agency’s emergency operation in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Beirut the same year. Kuneitra: Death of a City follows the forensic investigation into the Israeli atrocities committed in the Syrian town of Kuneitra in the Occupied Golan Heights during its occupation between 1967 and 1973, offering a stark portrayal of the devastation inflicted on the town and its few remaining residents. However, as Nadia Yaqub argues, while these films provide factual accounts of the dire conditions of the dispossessed, they often portray Palestinians as apolitical subjects who are entirely helpless, sidelining their agency. Yaqub notes that this “humanitarian gaze”, while aiming to speak for refugees, ultimately depoliticises their narrative by emphasising their suffering over their resilience and enduring desire to return home.⁸

The collection also includes experimental and essay films that can be considered as some of the earliest attempts to challenge the hegemonic narratives on Palestine, employing avant-garde techniques in some, and repurposing colonial archives in others. Palestine: The Path to Tragedy (Don Catchlove, 1970) is one of the earliest attempts to oppose the dominant colonial narrative on Palestine. Commissioned by the Arab League, Don Catchlove’s film subverts the colonial British archive to reconstruct a counter-narrative of Palestinian resistance and historical agency. Through meticulous editing, Catchlove juxtaposes colonial imagery of a “progressive and industrialised” pre-1948 Palestine with archival evidence of early Zionist terrorism and British complicity in dispossession, culminating in a stirring tribute to the nascent fida’iyin (freedom fighters). Blown By the Wind (Jacques Madvo, 1971) brings to life a series of drawings painted by displaced Palestinian children, offering a glimpse into their everyday life, their memories, imagination, and aspirations following their exodus to Lebanon in 1967. In Cowboy (1973), Egyptian critic and filmmaker Sami Al-Salamoni confronts Hollywood’s mythmaking by weaponising its own imagery against it. The Film stitches together still images from America’s bloody archives – Hollywood Westerns and documentary photographs of Vietnam War atrocities – and animates them through deliberate camera movements and jarring edits. Al-Salamouni’s method operates as a form of essayistic film criticism. By isolating and recontextualising static images, he forces the viewer to confront the latent violence in America’s cinematic fantasy and forges a new visual grammar of transnational solidarity.

The most significant portion of the Tokyo Reels is the collection of short and feature-length films produced under the auspices of the PLO by the different filmic arms, organisations, and cultural institutions that thrived throughout Palestinian population centres in the region since the late 1960s. Working with the Cultural Arts Section within the National Guidance Department of the PLO, Palestinian painter Ismail Shammout directed the short film, The Urgent Call (1973), in which Palestinian singer Zainab Shaath performs, in English, The Urgent Call of Palestine, a solidarity ballad urging the world to hear the plight of Palestinians. In the same year, Mustafa Abu Ali, co-founder of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU), repurposed footage shot by a French news team in Gaza during the early years of occupation and combined it with archival footage of resistance operations in the Strip. The result, Mashahid min al-‘ihtilal fi gaza (Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza, 1973), employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. Kufr Shuba (1975, Samir Nimr) and Al-harb fi lubnan (War in Lebanon, Baker Sharqawi, 1976) were both produced in Beirut by the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI), the PLO’s most serious effort at institutionalising and organising film production after moving from Jordan to Lebanon following the events of Black September. In Kufr Shuba, the Iraqi filmmaker Samir Nimr celebrates the steadfastness of the southern Lebanese village of Kufr Shuba against the constant Israeli aggressions on the South and commemorates the solidarity between the Lebanese and Palestinian villagers-turned-freedom fighters. In War in Lebanon, Egyptian director Baker Sharqawi documents the early years of the Lebanese Civil War, which erupted in 1975, and by 1976 had already resulted in the total split of Beirut into two regions: East and West Beirut. Land Day (Ghaleb Shaath, 1978) documents the events of what has since been commemorated as “Land Day,” a general strike and a mass demonstration that took place on March 30, 1976, organised by the Palestinian residents of the Lower Galilee region against the continuous Israeli expropriation of Arab land.

Finally, the collection features six films that can be grouped under the expansive umbrella of solidarity cinema, a diverse group of films, in form and style, reflecting the political commitment of filmmakers and cinematic institutions from around the world, united by a dedication to support Palestinian liberation. Produced by the State Establishment for Cinema and Theatre in Iraq, Al-lu’ba (The Game, Shirak, 1973) and Al-haql (The Field, Sabih Al-Zohiri, 1977) use allegory and symbolism to address the question of Palestine, reflecting the centrality of the Palestinian cause to decolonisation projects in the region. Palestine and Japan (T. Maki, 1979) celebrates the political, diplomatic, and personal connections between the two countries by documenting the anniversary of opening the PLO’s representative office in Tokyo and highlighting the increasing efforts of solidarity networks and campaigns spreading across Japan. Two films were made during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in the summer of 1982. In Why? (1982), German filmmaker Monica Maurer collaborated with the PLO filmmakers to document the revolution’s resilience under siege, underscoring the role of the PLO’s Civil Defence Committee, which was organised to provide aid, protect schools, mosques, and churches, and establish shelters for the displaced. In Beirut 1982 (1982), Japanese journalist Ryuichi Hirokawa documents the immediate aftermath of the invasion and the atrocities committed by the Israeli forces. Hirokawa was one of the first people to walk into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, offering the chilling first-witness account of the massacre. committed by Israel forces on the morning of Saturday, 18 September 1982. Finally, Paresuchina kokka e no michi (The Road to a Palestinian State, 1974) is one episode of a television mini-series titled Kon’nichi no Chūtō (The Middle East Today), produced by Japan’s Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) between December 1974 and February 1975. The episode reports on the future of Palestine following the United Nations’ recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Notably, it offers a critical perspective on the PLO’s diplomatic approach through interviews with members of the Marxist-Leninist faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose opposition to the PLO’s negotiations was intensifying at the time.

Altogether, these films make up a cinematic archive – a repository of sorts – that significantly contributes to preserving the visual history of the Palestinian struggle. The diversity of perspectives, and perhaps more importantly, the contradictions within them, challenge our understanding of our own history and illuminate the dynamic ways in which Palestine was constantly reimagined and contested from within and without. I now turn to a particular film in the collection, War in Lebanon, which was produced by the Palestine Cinema Institute in Beirut. My aim is to flesh out the complexities of the struggle as they are inscribed in the film.  Finally, in the epilogue, I take a step back to reflect on the process of working with the collection, underscoring how the acts of preservation and restoration themselves become a form of historical and political intervention, one that not only strives to safeguard the past but also to reanimate it for contemporary audiences.

Beirut, Revisited

My work with the collection – translating its films, annotating its archival traces, and reconstructing its fragmented histories – inevitably became an act of historical excavation. Through this process, I grew attuned to how Palestinian cinema documented the lived experience of exile in Lebanon, a period defined by the PLO’s precarious position: caught between the promise of revolutionary solidarity and the looming threats of Lebanese sectarian violence, internal divisions, and Israeli incursions. In this sense, War in Lebanon emerged as a particularly revealing film, distinguished by its rigorous class analysis, a stark departure from earlier films made under the auspices of the PLO.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, War in Lebanon was the first film shown to Mohanad Yaqubi upon encountering the archive in Tokyo. Yaqubi met Mineo Mitsui through Professor Tanami, the collection’s principal caretaker. In the 1960s, Mitsui had worked as an assistant on several of Kōji Wakamatsu’s pink films, and through this connection, eventually became involved in advocating for the Palestinian struggle, initially by collaborating with the PLO Tokyo office as a photographer documenting their events. When the office closed in 1995, Mitsui assumed responsibility for the collection after several institutions refused it, ultimately housing the material between his own home and Tanami’s. For their meeting, Mitsui brought the reel of War in Lebanon to a social centre in northern Tokyo equipped with a 16mm projector, where he and Yaqubi watched it together. This moment was particularly striking because, while the film was unknown to us – as a collective working on Palestinian film archives – we learned from Mitsui that it had been widely circulated among Japanese activists and solidarity networks.

Produced in 1976, the film delivers a harrowing and detailed account of the Lebanese Civil War’s brutal early phase following its April 1975 outbreak, chronicling Beirut’s physical and social collapse. Through an unrelenting stream of stark juxtapositions, it frames the conflict as a class war by exposing the grotesque inequalities beneath Beirut’s glamorous façade: luxury hotels turned sniper nests, bullet-riddled storefronts, and a belt of refugee camps surrounding the capital where Lebanon’s disenfranchised majority fought alongside Palestinian refugees, forging solidarities across sectarian lines. Notably, the film opens with an intertitle that reflects the broader ethos of militant Palestinian cinema: 

“This film is a documentation of the Lebanese Civil War until the beginning of October of 1976. This war has been wider and far too large to be recorded by any camera, however, in this film we tried to present the essence of the conditions that led to its eruption, so that the world witnesses it in order to commemorate the lives of its martyrs from both the Lebanese and Palestinian people.”

While acknowledging the limitations of its medium, this statement underscores the film’s ambition to transcend mere documentation: it is both a forensic record of violence and an act of collective mourning. 

War in Lebanon

Nadia Yaqub notes that the filmmakers of the Palestinian revolution were fundamentally engaged with questions of visibility, focusing their efforts “straightforwardly on serving the Palestinian revolution by creating and disseminating films grounded […] in local Palestinian experiences within the struggle.”⁹ Nowhere is this duality more potent than in the film’s depiction of the Tal al-Zaatar siege, where the camera’s focus on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians enduring 63 days of bombardment becomes a radical counter-narrative to dominant war reporting. By framing the camp’s defence as “a glorious Arab legend that will be like ammunition for our future generations,” War in Lebanon inverts the typical victimisation trope, transforming survivors into protagonists of a Marxist-inflected epic.

It was, in fact, the film’s commitment to class analysis that drew me to closer examination: its Marxist clarity stood in sharp contrast to the ideological flexibility of earlier PLO films, raising broader questions about cinematic expression during this period. In his analysis of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) and the Palestine Cinema Group (PCG) – which would later emerge into the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI) – between 1968 and 1974, Nick Denes frames their early works as formal experiments that mirrored Fatah’s politically ambiguous trajectory during the revolution’s ascendant years. Films like Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza (1973) and They Do Not Exist (1974) documented Israeli violence with visceral immediacy, yet – much like Fatah’s rhetoric – often sidestepped explicit ideological articulation, privileging populist motifs of “steadfastness” over structured class critique. By 1973, however, as Fatah pivoted toward state-building post-October War, the Unit’s films increasingly traded radical heterogeneity for what Denes calls a “refusal of cinematic extravagances” (237). This shift, Denes argues, not only reflected Fatah’s unresolved contradictions between militancy and diplomacy but also marked the eclipse of the PFU’s early formal adventurism by the demands of institutional legitimacy.

In contrast, War in Lebanon dispels such ambiguities by grounding its critique in a Marxist class framework. Rather than presenting the conflict as a sectarian clash between Muslims and Christians, the film reframes it as a systemic class war waged by the wealthy elite against the disenfranchised poor. The narration – written and voiced by Baker Al-Sharqawy, an Egyptian screenwriter who joined the Palestinian Revolution – opens with a deliberate juxtaposition: Beirut’s glittering reputation as a cosmopolitan hub of free trade and political liberalism is sharply undercut by images of its war-torn reality. “Strong and beautiful,” Al-Sharqawy intones, “Beirut gained significant fame in the past 20 years, for it had become the city of wealth and beauty, free trade, political freedoms, and tourism. This reputation, however, has been stained with blood and destruction… It was beautiful indeed, but its ruined beauty concealed all kinds of political, social, and economic contradictions among the classes that resided in it.” Here, the film’s intervention becomes clear: beneath the veneer of urban modernity lies the violence of class antagonism, a structural analysis that earlier works often sidestepped.

War in Lebanon

The film’s Marxist framework systematically exposes how Lebanon’s conflict emerged from colonial-engineered class contradictions. It traces these divisions to the French Mandate’s institutional privileging of the Maronite elite, which created enduring economic disparities. This point is underscored by an interview with the Leader of the Lebanese National Movement at the time, Kamal Jumblat, who details how Lebanon’s “unbridled capitalism” enriched just 4% of the population while 96% lived on only 40% of the national income. Through such explicit materialist analysis, the film reframes the war as a class struggle between the Lebanese National Movement’s multi-confessional proletarian coalition and the Maronite “fascist sectarianism” protecting bourgeois interests. This represents a radical departure from both dominant sectarian narratives and the PLO’s characteristic ambiguity: where Denes notes that Palestinian cinema often privileged symbolic resistance over structural critique, War in Lebanon methodically documents how tax evasion, monopolies, and the brain drain of educated workers – not just external aggression – reproduced the conditions for conflict. In doing so, the film articulates what regional politics typically marginalise: a coherent Marxist-Leninist position that links anti-colonialism to class revolution. Thus, by centring class as the war’s foundational contradiction, War in Lebanon transcends mere counter-narrative to reclaim revolutionary cinema’s capacity for dialectical critique. 

In the end, what makes War in Lebanon remarkable is its synthesis of form and praxis. Leveraging the Palestine Cinema Institute’s decentralised networks, the filmmakers – operating under mortal threat – forge a dialectic of their own: they couple the urgency of frontline documentation with incisive historical materialism. Every formal choice becomes a political act, distilling the tension between witnessing and theorising. Here, cinema is neither a mere artifact nor agitprop, but a site of struggle where commitment to the revolutionary ideal often demanded the ultimate price.

Epilogue: Beyond Preservation

Working on the Tokyo Reels and broadly engaging with Palestinian film archives has been as much about excavation as it has been about reanimation of what the archives contain. Fragmented, scattered, and often overlooked, the archives demand more than preservation; they require us to confront their imperfection as a provocation. Working along with other members of Subversive Film, we collectively addressed this by producing detailed catalogues for each film in the collection, designed to provide a foundation to facilitate deeper study.

These catalogues – providing production details, synopses, and complete transcriptions of voice-overs and interviews in Arabic, English, and Japanese – serve not only as research tools but as gestures of reciprocity. Within the archive, we find traces of Japanese activists’ engagement with the films, demonstrating their attentiveness to the language barrier faced by local audiences. Their intervention primarily took the form of dubbing and subtitling, and in some cases, they added supplementary material to deepen viewers’ understanding. War in Lebanon, for instance, was partially subtitled in Japanese, while Land Day features a dubbed voice-over, subtitled songs, and intertitles – including credits – replaced with Japanese text that faithfully retains the original’s stylistic and chromatic choice.

Land Day

Moreover, this version of the film, reproduced in Japan in 1983 by Labor Film Company in collaboration with the PLO representative office in Tokyo, is prefaced by an introduction by Yūzō Itagaki, a University of Tokyo professor specialising in modern Middle Eastern history, who provides essential context for the film’s subject matter. As Julian Ross notes in “Tokyo Reels: The Solidarity Image”, such adaptations underscore the role of Japanese activists and film collectives, such as the Nihon Documentarist Union (NDP) and Hiroshima Screening Committee, in localising Palestinian narratives, mapping an “archipelagic thought” that connected Japan’s documentary community to global liberation struggles.¹⁰ 

Pages from the catalogue of the Japanese version of Why

Pages from the catalogue of the Japanese version of Why

Pages from the catalogue of the Japanese version of Why

From this standpoint, the decision to include Japanese in the catalogues deliberately echoes the solidarity that originally safeguarded the reels, returning the gesture across decades. Just as Japanese activists and filmmakers had intervened to dub, subtitle, and annotate these films for their communities, we recognised that our scholarly labour must extend toward reciprocity. Language here became more than utility; it is a testament to how preservation itself can be a form of political continuity.

The Tokyo Reels collection, with its Japanese solidarity films, underscores how transnational alliances were forged not only through ideology but through material acts of care. Just as the films’ creators used cinema to engage with revolution, our work on the catalogues attempts to extend that practice, transforming archival fragments into living dialogues. To study these reels is to witness how Japanese activists witnessed and engaged with the Palestinian struggle; to catalogue them is to ensure that their visions remain legible as more than historical artifacts, but as blueprints for solidarity.

Ultimately, this project has fundamentally shaped my understanding of archives as contested spaces where the past insists on its relevance. Through this process of excavation and reinterpretation, we begin to piece together a picture of the past that honours the voices and visions of those who documented their struggles with such urgency and purpose. By restoring The Tokyo Reels archive and rendering it accessible in different languages, we hope to not only preserve a slice of Palestine’s history but to rearm it. In doing so, we reaffirm these film’s enduring relevance, bridging the gap between past and present in meaningful and transformative ways.

Endnotes