Palestinian films that challenge oppression and propose alternative ways of being
The cinema is not accessible to people with limited mobility (about twenty steps to go down).
Firas Shehade - Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal
Sarah Risheq - ghost_archives
Diana Al-Halabi - The Battle of Empty Stomachs
Marwa Arsanios - Who is afraid of ideology?
Mona Benyamin - tomorrow, again
Jumana Emil Abboud - Feel Everything
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Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal
14min, 2023, Palestine
In RPG (role-playing game) video games, real life can be recreated in a way reminiscent of fantasy or superstition, with supernatural characters and environments. This video game essay shows how Palestinian players, GTA mods, and servers simulate real life under colonial rule – Los Santos as a mirror image of Palestine.
Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and researcher living in Vienna. His work deals with world-building, meaning, aesthetics, and identity after/on the internet. This film was commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum.
ghost_archives
3min, 2024, Jordan
This archive is a physical reaction to forgetting, remembering, giving away, or even denying. A monologue of a few minutes in which archives are not seen as storage spaces of the past but as living entities haunted by memories, sorrow, and fractures. Scan the QR code to remember.
Sarah Risheq is a writer, editor, and storyteller/collector from Amman. They enjoy formulating questions that allow them to build worlds and burn others, expand their sensitivities, and broaden their imagination about what is possible. Risheq has published a short story, rise, and conducted in-depth research on Ancestral Palestinian Healing Practices as a Politics of Return.
The Battle of Empty Stomachs
23min, 2024, The Netherlands
Based on research and interviews with both Palestinian hunger strikers and asylum seekers, this absurd yet realistic film stages a dialogue between the director and her mother tongue, with a central question: what do we know about hunger?
Diana Al-Halabi is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in 1990 in Lebanon and lives in Rotterdam. Through an intersectional feminist lens, Al-Halabi’s practice moves from the personal to the political, addressing concepts such as the patriarchal gaze, institutional violence, bureaucracy, colonial colonialism, and the visa regime. In 2023, she received the IFFR RTM PITCH Award for the production of this short film, which premiered at IFFR 2024.
Who is afraid of ideology? Part 3: Micro Resistencias
31min, 2020, Colombia
Who is afraid of ideology? Part 3: Micro Resistencias interweaves the voices of various women from the coffee-producing region of Tolima, Colombia. They speak of the struggle to preserve the ancestral knowledge of indigenous communities while being exposed to exploitation and violence – even murder. Landscapes, portraits, interviews, and songs speak of cultivating and protecting seeds that enable these women to gain a form of autonomy.
Marwa Arsanios (1978) was born in Washington DC and currently lives and works in Berlin. She is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose work can take the form of installation, performance, and moving image. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Documenta 15, and MoMA. This film premiered as an installation at the 2020 Berlin Biennale.
Tomorrow, again, 2023, 11min
11min, 2023, Palestine
In a dysfunctional news broadcast about daily catastrophes in Palestine, the two main characters, the artist's parents, take on multiple identities, resulting in an endless loop where they are the objects, the spectators, and the medium, telling and consuming their own stories. The film uses an exaggerated and surreal visual language to explore concepts like truth and fiction, and what happens to urgency when it becomes timeless.
Mona Benyamin (1997) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer living and working in Palestine. In her work, she explores intergenerational perspectives on hope, trauma, and different perceptions of time. By playing with popular mass media formats and using dark humor, she questions notions of authenticity and truthfulness. This film was commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms/A.M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Arts Council England and the Bagri Foundation.
Feel Everything
9 min, 2022, Palestine
This film is inspired by the Palestinian folktale Half-a-halfling [Nos Nsais], in which a half-child is born from the magic of half a pomegranate. Through metaphors and fragments, the main character is unravelled into an omnipresent-but-incomplete entity that takes the form of water. Who has access to water today and to all things embodied in it, such as one's homeland, life source, and threatened legacy?
Jumana Emil Abboud (1971) is a Palestinian-Canadian artist who lives and works in Jerusalem and London. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Abboud works on workshops and collaborations in drawing, performance, and storytelling. She embraces folklore and breathes life into places where water exists through collective processes and narrative constellations. This film was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation and was also shown at Documenta 15 in Kassel.
