Social & External
Rafah is located in the southern Gaza Strip. It’s a city cut in two by the Philadelphia Road, a security corridor between Sinai and Gaza. It’s destiny changed during the night of 12 September 2005, when the Israeli army withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The Israelis evacuated the Philadelphia Road and the colonies surrounding the city disappeared. But Rafah would never emerge from its chaos. Rafah is the hub of arms trafficking between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Since the Israeli withdrawal, these arms have contributed to the bloody wars between families. After the Hamas victory at the legislative elections, the city sank into a major economic crisis. On 25 June, 2006, Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted by Palestinian militants using a tunnel dug from Rafah. In reprisal, Tsahal shelled the houses of arms dealers located along the Philadelphia Road. By 12 September, 2006, a year after the withdrawal, all hopes of rebirth had died.
A verité legal drama about Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari'a court in the Middle East, whose career provides rare insights into both Islamic law and gendered justice.
2003 documentary film produced by Oliver Stone for the HBO series America Undercover about the conflict in occupied Palestine. He speaks with Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime ministers of Israel, Yasser Arafat, late president of the Palestinian National Authority, and various Palestinian activists resisting the oppression of the zionist regime.
This documentary, filmed after October 7, places recent events in context and retraces the extraordinary history of this region to shed light on the present, interviewing actors and witnesses to this conflict: Islamists, Jewish nationalists, imams, rabbis, intellectuals, urban planners, soldiers, etc.
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
Seven militant women (fedaiyat) of the revolutionary generation tell the story of the Palestinian resistance through accounts of their own lives. Cut from 35 hours of interviews with leaders of the armed struggle, the film presents an image of confident, unapologetic and proud feminine identity. Together, the memories of these women narrate the dream of a generation, yet unrealized.
3 CM LESS (the title comes from projections that the Palestinian children of today will grow up on average three centimeters shorter than their parents, thanks to the deprivations of occupation) is a complex, highly personal look at the impact decades of war has wreaked on families and friendships.
Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.
The film examines a personal attempt to address existential concepts related to Palestinians such as exile, return and the image of the homeland.
Guy Hircefeld, a veteran who served in the Israeli military at the start of its occupation of Palestine in the 1980s, now fights against the Israeli occupation. His only weapon is a camera.
A portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives. Farah Hatoum, a widow living with her children and grandchildren, and Sahar Khalifeh, a novelist from the West Bank.
Documentary about war photographer James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever.
During the Syrian civil war, the district of Yarmouk, home to thousands of Palestinians, became the scene of dramatic and ferocious fighting. Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege) is a film that follows the destiny of civilians during the brutal sieges, imposed by the Syrian regime, that took place in the wake of the battles. With his camera, Abdallah Al-Khatib composes a love song to a place that proudly resists the atrocities of war.
Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.
This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers and the alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.
The film "Searching for Freedom: The Holy Land Foundation" is a two part documentary focussing on the story of the Holy Land Foundation, established in the late 80s by three Americans from Palestinian origin, Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi and Mohammad El-Mezain. The foundation aimed to supply humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Palestine and countries hosting Palestinian refugees, it later became the largest charity association in the US to distribute humanitarian aid to Palestinians. After 9/11, the former US President George W. Bush issued a decision to shut down the Holy Land Foundation and freeze its assets. In 2007 the Holy Land Foundation trials began, where five of its members were charged with funding terrorism and sending money to Hamas, a blacklisted political group in the US. A second trial for the Holy Land Foundation members took place in 2008, which issued the convictions of five members of the Foundation and their sentencing of 65 years imprisonment.
The pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist, BDSM-provocative, techno-punk performance art ensemble Hatari unsurprisingly drew attention to themselves with their performance at the Icelandic qualifiers for the Eurovision Song Contest. So much so that they won and therefore were allowed to perform at the main event in Tel Aviv. But what now? Should they boycott the event, swallow their idealism, or use their airtime to criticise the host country for their illegal occupation of Palestine? The Icelandic director Anna Hildur joins the boys in the band all the way to the fateful final.
Five broken cameras – and each one has a powerful tale to tell. Embedded in the bullet-ridden remains of digital technology is the story of Emad Burnat, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in, which famously chose nonviolent resistance when the Israeli army encroached upon its land to make room for Jewish colonists. Emad buys his first camera in 2005 to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Over the course of the film, he becomes the peaceful archivist of an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.
In Killing Gaza, independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen documented Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. Yet this film is much more than a documentary about Palestinian resilience and suffering. It is a chilling visual document of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, featuring direct testimony and evidence from the survivors.
While millions of birds migrate freely in the skies above, Fadia, a Palestinian refugee stranded in Lebanon, yearns for the ancestral homeland she is denied. When a chance meeting introduces her to the director, Sarah, she challenges her to find an ancient mulberry tree that once grew next to her grandfather’s house in historic Palestine, a tree that stands witness to her family’s existence.
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