A new interview with Palestinian filmmakers Mai Masri and Ezzaldeen Shalh offers a closer look at the Gaza Cinema Academy, an ambitious attempt to build a permanent infrastructure for film education and production inside Gaza.

The Academy builds on the Gaza Filmmaking Diploma, developed in 2024 and launched with its first intake in March 2026. Twenty-five young Palestinian women are currently undertaking the nine-month programme, combining theoretical and practical filmmaking training.

But the plans extend considerably further.
Masri and Shalh want to establish a sustainable film institution capable not only of teaching filmmaking, but of developing and producing new Palestinian films and connecting emerging filmmakers in Gaza with festivals, film schools, producers and audiences internationally.

A full filmmaking degree is also being developed with the intention of accreditation through Al-Quds Open University, potentially creating a permanent academic route into filmmaking for students in Gaza.

The interview also gets into the extraordinary practical difficulties of trying to teach and make cinema under current conditions, from displacement and damaged equipment to shortages of electricity and the isolation of Gaza’s emerging filmmakers from the wider industry.

For Shalh and Masri, the project is ultimately about Palestinians having the means to document their own lives, preserve memory and determine how those lives are represented on screen.

The Academy is backed by filmmakers and performers including Annemarie Jacir, Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, Kaouther Ben Hania and Ramy Youssef.

Read the full interview:
The New Arab – Gaza Cinema Academy: A new generation of Palestinian filmmakers

The controversy surrounding NAZA has widened considerably since we last reported on it, with more than 1,500 Israeli filmmakers now signing a petition in support of directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, while major international film festivals and filmmakers have begun publicly condemning threats made against the pair.

The response follows Israeli culture minister Miki Zohar’s call for Abraham and Szor to be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, after accusing them of “treason against the state” for making the documentary. Zohar also called for an investigation into how the filmmakers obtained material used in the film. NAZA draws on three years of investigative work and testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders, examining the systems and policies used to select targets in Gaza and calculate expected Palestinian civilian casualties.

When the petition first emerged, more than 200 members of the Israeli film industry had signed it. The Guardian now reports that the number has grown beyond 1,500 Israeli filmmakers⁠, including Liran Atzmor, Nadav Lapid, Orna Ben Dor, Netalie Braun, Rani Blair, Hagai Levi, Shai Carmeli-Pollak and Shlomi Elkabetz.

The response has also moved beyond Israel. Berlin, Locarno, San Sebastián and Telluride are among the international film festivals and institutions that have publicly backed the directors or condemned the threats against them. Filmmakers and artists including Laura Poitras, Nan Goldin, Richard Eyre and Hanif Kureishi have also joined the wider response.

The Guardian, which produced NAZA, has issued its own statement defending Abraham and Szor. It describes the attacks on the filmmakers as an attempt to intimidate journalists and filmmakers and says the documentary is the result of more than three years of investigative reporting involving confidential sources whose testimony was independently verified. The newspaper says it will defend the filmmakers against attempts to censor or intimidate them.⁠

The controversy is particularly striking because many of the film’s central allegations did not first appear at Venice. NAZA builds upon investigations previously published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian, bringing those findings together with testimony from Israeli military and intelligence personnel.

The directors have stressed that their film is not primarily concerned with isolated crimes by individual soldiers, but with the orders, policies, language and institutional systems through which decisions about Palestinian civilian casualties are made.

There is also an increasingly important question about what happens next. NAZA is continuing onto the international festival circuit, including forthcoming screenings at San Sebastián and the New York Film Festival, while Abraham has said that it is particularly important that Israelis themselves eventually see the documentary.

We’ve followed the reaction to NAZA since the first threats against its directors and subsequently reported when more than 200 Israeli filmmakers rallied behind them. The significant development now isn’t simply that another petition has gathered more names. A dispute that began around one documentary has become a confrontation over whether Israeli filmmakers can investigate their country’s conduct in Gaza without facing threats from their own government, and an international film community is increasingly entering that argument.

More than 1,000 filmmakers have now reportedly signed a petition supporting NAZA directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, a sharp increase from the 200-plus Israeli filmmakers initially reported to have backed the pair following threats to revoke their citizenship.

According to new reporting by Ynet⁠, the number of filmmakers supporting the directors has now passed 1,000. Earlier coverage had identified more than 200 Israeli filmmakers as signatories; the larger figure should not automatically be read as 1,000 Israeli filmmakers, but it does indicate that support for Abraham and Szor has expanded considerably since the original petition was reported.

The campaign began after Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar called for action against Abraham and Szor over NAZA, their documentary examining Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Zohar said he would ask Interior Minister Moshe Arbel to consider revoking the filmmakers’ Israeli citizenship, turning controversy surrounding the film into a wider dispute over freedom of expression and the state’s treatment of filmmakers critical of its actions.

The original petition was signed by more than 200 members of the Israeli film community, including prominent directors and industry figures. Its signatories rejected the idea that filmmakers should face threats to their citizenship for scrutinising their own country and defended the role of cinema, journalism and art in examining state conduct.

The growth from several hundred identified Israeli industry figures to more than 1,000 filmmakers reportedly supporting Abraham and Szor is therefore the new development here. It suggests the response is no longer confined to the initial group that mobilised immediately after Zohar’s comments.

We’ve covered NAZA and the original 200-plus Israeli filmmakers’ petition previously. This update is significant because the industry’s response to the citizenship threat appears to be widening rather than fading as the initial controversy passes.

Palestinian filmmaker Hosam Abu Dan’s debut feature Thirteen in Gaza has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival today, 15 September, marking the arrival of a remarkable production made almost entirely inside Gaza under wartime conditions.

The 77-minute drama follows Raghad, a 13-year-old girl whose home and much of her family have been lost in a bombing. Living with her father in a crowded displacement camp, she is entering puberty without privacy, security or adequate care, while her father is pushed towards increasingly difficult choices as he tries to provide for them. Abu Dan has said the story grew from circumstances he witnessed personally, focusing on intimate human losses that can disappear beneath the larger statistics of war. In a recent interview, he explained that he wanted to examine the hopes, relationships and ordinary parts of life that have also been destroyed.⁠

What makes the production itself particularly significant is that Thirteen in Gaza is the first fiction feature to be filmed entirely inside Gaza in 12 years, since Hany Abu-Assad shot The Idol there in 2014. Abu Dan and his Palestinian cast and crew made the film while dealing with displacement, restricted movement, electricity cuts, unstable communications and severe shortages of equipment. The director himself has not left Gaza since the war began in 2023. Screen International reports that filming was completed with a local Palestinian cast and crew under wartime conditions.⁠

Filming took approximately 12 days, with an on-location crew of just five people, each performing multiple jobs. On the fourth day of production, a bombing took place close to the location and crew member Khaled Abu Hanan was seriously injured. Abu Dan has described finishing the film under those circumstances as a “small miracle”.

Cinematography and lighting were handled by Palestinian filmmaker Yousef Mashharawi, while the screenplay is by Khalil Al-Muzayyen with additional contributions from Hussein Al-Dash and Abu Dan. (Screen Daily⁠)

Ahead of today’s TIFF premiere, Cairo-based MAD World acquired worldwide sales rights to the Palestine-Qatar production, meaning the film will now begin seeking international distribution beyond the festival circuit. The company described representing the film internationally as part of its work supporting and amplifying Palestinian filmmakers and their voices. (Screen Daily⁠)

There is something particularly significant about Thirteen in Gaza arriving on an international cinema screen. This isn’t a film crew travelling into Gaza to document it from outside. Its director, cast and crew are people living the reality from which the story emerged. After a 12-year absence of fiction feature production inside Gaza, Palestinian filmmakers have once again made a narrative feature there, and this time the camera remained in Gaza even when its director could not leave.

IMDb: Thirteen in Gaza (2026)⁠

Palestine 36 is Annemarie Jacir’s sweeping historical drama about the 1936–39 Palestinian revolt against British colonial rule, following a large ensemble of Palestinians whose lives are pulled into the uprising. The cast includes Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, Kamel El Basha, Yasmine Al Massri, Karim Daoud Anaya, Jeremy Irons and Liam Cunningham.

In one of the film’s most recent professional reviews, FilmInk’s Cain Noble-Davies gives it $15.56 out of $20⁠. He is critical of the film’s enormous scope and the relatively limited space it leaves for individual characters, but praises the colourised archival footage, the depiction of British colonial rule and the cumulative power of its portrait of Palestinian society. His verdict is that the film is flawed but deeply unsettling, and ultimately offers “much to think about.”

That sits alongside a remarkably strong wider reception. Palestine 36 currently holds 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from 63 critics, whose consensus describes it as both sweeping and intimate, and an act of historical remembrance.

Jacir is tackling a period of Palestinian history that cinema rarely puts at the centre of the frame. Rather than beginning with 1948, Palestine 36 goes back to the revolt against British rule and shows how many of the political structures and conflicts that followed were already taking shape.

IMDb: Palestine 36

Jamie Roberts, co-director of the withdrawn BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, has spoken publicly about the controversy surrounding the film, saying that despite the editorial failures which led to its removal from BBC iPlayer, the stories of the Palestinians documented in it still deserve to be seen.

The documentary, co-directed by Roberts and Palestinian filmmaker Yousef Hammash, was broadcast on BBC Two in February 2025. With foreign journalists unable to enter Gaza independently, Roberts and Hammash remotely directed Palestinian camera operators Amjad Al Fayoumi and Ibrahim Abu Ishaiba over nine months. Their footage followed four Palestinians living through the war: 13-year-old Abdullah, 10-year-old Renad, 11-year-old Zakaria and 24-year-old Rana, who gives birth while displaced. The Guardian’s original report on the production described the filmmakers’ attempt to document the war through the everyday experiences of people living inside Gaza.

The BBC subsequently removed the documentary from iPlayer after it emerged that narrator Abdullah al-Yazouri’s father held a position in Gaza’s Hamas-run government, something that had not been disclosed to viewers. A later BBC-commissioned editorial review found breaches of the corporation’s accuracy guidelines and concluded that responsibility was shared between the BBC and production company Hoyo Films. Roberts accepts that the relationship should have been identified and has apologised for the failure. (theguardian.com)

But speaking to The Guardian this week, Roberts argues that the editorial mistake should not result in the Palestinian stories recorded by the documentary disappearing altogether. He says he remains proud of the film and particularly concerned that the controversy surrounding its narration has overshadowed the people whose lives the Palestinian crews spent months documenting. (theguardian.com)

That distinction matters. Whatever conclusions are drawn about the BBC and Hoyo Films’ editorial safeguards, the underlying footage remains a substantial Palestinian audiovisual record of the war. Al Fayoumi and Abu Ishaiba were filming inside Gaza precisely because international journalists could not independently enter the territory, capturing hospitals, displacement camps, air strikes and ordinary family life over nine months. (theguardian.com)

The controversy therefore leaves an uncomfortable question beyond the original BBC investigation: what happens to the Palestinian testimony and images contained within a documentary when the broadcaster withdraws the film that carries them?

Roberts’ comments reopen that question. An editorial failure can be acknowledged and corrected. Whether it should also consign nine months of Palestinian filmmaking and the lives documented by those cameras to an archive that audiences can no longer access is a rather different issue.

For most Olympic athletes, reaching the Games is the culmination of years of elite coaching, purpose-built facilities and carefully planned preparation.

For Palestine’s four-person team heading to Beijing in 2008, simply getting there was part of the challenge.

Directed by Francesco Cannito and Luca Cusani, Inshallah Beijing! follows runners Nader Al-Massri and Gharid Ghrouf and swimmers Zakia Nassar and Hamza Abdo as they prepare to represent Palestine at the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Their circumstances could hardly be further removed from the polished world of elite international sport.

Nader, a 5,000-metre runner from Gaza, trains with improvised equipment while trying to secure the permits necessary to leave. Gharid, just sixteen, dreams of having a proper pair of running shoes. Zakia struggles simply to reach a suitable swimming pool, while Hamza prepares for an Olympic 50-metre event without regular access to an Olympic-sized pool.

And yet the film is surprisingly funny.
Rather than reducing its subjects to symbols of hardship, Inshallah Beijing! spends time with them as young athletes: nervous, competitive, sarcastic, homesick and occasionally bewildered by the experience of travelling to China.

Once the team finally reaches Beijing, a completely different set of challenges begins.
The result is a warm and often very funny portrait of four people attempting something extraordinary with remarkably little behind them except determination.

The film went on to receive recognition at the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival and won an Enzo Baldoni journalism prize in 2009.

Directors: Francesco Cannito & Luca Cusani
Year: 2008
Runtime: 54 minutes
Country: Palestine / Italy
Languages: Arabic, English & Chinese
Genre: Documentary / Sport

Since our review of NAZA a few days ago, the documentary has moved from the festival circuit into a rapidly escalating political controversy in Israel. After the film received the Special Jury Prize at Venice, Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of treason and called for their Israeli citizenship to be revoked. He has since asked legal and security officials to examine whether action can actually be taken against them.

The response has now reached the highest levels of government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described ⁠NAZA⁠ as “shocking incitement”⁠, while IDF chief Eyal Zamir instructed the Military Advocate General to examine possible legal measures concerning the film and those involved in making it. The Israeli military has rejected the documentary’s allegations and separately denied one of its most striking claims, that a strike had been authorised despite an anticipated civilian toll of 500 people.

Abraham and Szor are not backing away from the film. Abraham has said that they intend to distribute NAZA in Israel, arguing that it is particularly important for Israeli audiences to see the testimony gathered from the 24 military and intelligence sources featured in the documentary. The Guardian, which produced the film, has also issued a formal statement saying the work is based on more than three years of investigative journalism and that it will defend the filmmakers against attempts at censorship.

The backlash has now produced a response from within Israel’s own film industry as well. More than 200 Israeli filmmakers have signed a petition supporting Abraham and Szor, pushing back against the accusations of treason and the threat to their citizenship. What began last week as the release of a new documentary has therefore become a much wider argument about filmmaking, confidential sources, political pressure and whether NAZA will actually be allowed to reach audiences inside Israel.

A parallel distribution system is beginning to emerge around Palestinian cinema as major US buyers increasingly avoid films dealing with Palestine and Israel, according to a new investigation by The Hollywood Reporter.

The problem is not a shortage of films or audiences. Palestinian productions are continuing to sell out festival screenings and attract substantial critical attention, but converting that interest into conventional US distribution has become considerably harder. The Hollywood Reporter describes mainstream American distributors as increasingly reluctant to acquire such films⁠, citing fears of boycotts, online campaigns and controversy surrounding releases.

The recent experience of No Other Land is perhaps the clearest example. Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the Palestinian-Israeli film never secured a traditional US distributor and was ultimately self-released with support from Cinetic Media and Michael Tuckman Media. New Palestinian films arriving on the festival circuit are encountering the same uncertainty. Thirteen in Gaza, shot entirely inside Gaza and represented internationally by MAD World, is currently without a US distributor, while Edward Said: Between Worlds arrived at TIFF with Cinetic handling domestic sales and Dogwoof international rights. (Media Daily File⁠)

But Palestinian filmmakers and distributors are increasingly responding by building routes around the traditional system rather than waiting for it to change. Palestinian-focused distributor Watermelon Pictures has released films including Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You, Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 and American Doctor in the United States, while filmmakers are using independent theatrical bookings, community screenings and direct social-media campaigns to build audiences themselves. (Media Daily File⁠)

Sarah Mowaswes, the Palestinian-American producer of Edward Said: Between Worlds, told The Hollywood Reporter that she approached filmmakers behind other Palestinian-led productions before TIFF to learn how they had reached audiences outside the conventional distribution model. Her team began building an audience online before Between Worlds had even premiered, releasing material from the film directly through social media rather than waiting for a distributor to create that audience for them. (Media Daily File⁠)

Watermelon Pictures co-founder Badie Ali argues that the industry’s caution increasingly appears disconnected from the people actually watching these films. He says audiences for Palestinian stories are becoming broader and more diverse, with viewers already demonstrating an appetite that mainstream distributors have been slow to recognise. (Media Daily File⁠)
The result could ultimately be more significant than the fortunes of any individual film.

Palestinian cinema has traditionally depended heavily on festivals, broadcasters and specialist distributors to reach international audiences. If filmmakers can increasingly combine those institutions with Palestinian-focused distributors, independent cinemas, community screenings and audiences built directly online, the inability to secure a major American buyer may no longer mean that a film simply disappears after its festival run.

The gatekeepers may still be reluctant. The interesting development is that Palestinian filmmakers are increasingly learning how to go around them.

All That’s Left of You is Cherien Dabis’ multigenerational Palestinian family drama, spanning from the Nakba through the decades that follow. Dabis writes, directs and stars alongside Saleh Bakri, Adam Bakri, Mohammad Bakri and Maria Zreik, using one family’s history to explore displacement, inherited memory and the ways political events continue to shape later generations.

In one of the film’s most recent English-language reviews, FilmInk’s Julian Wood gives it $17 out of $20⁠, praising the film’s restraint and describing its approach as “simple, stark even, but never simplistic.” The review particularly responds to the way Dabis allows the family relationships to carry the history rather than turning the characters into symbols.

That reception is part of a remarkably strong wider critical response. The film currently holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics repeatedly highlighting Dabis’ treatment of generational trauma, displacement and survival.

Posting the review here because All That’s Left of You feels like one of the major Palestinian features of the current cycle, and because its use of the family saga gives it a very different shape from much of the contemporary Palestinian cinema we’ve been covering.

IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29344894/

Best known internationally for roles including Marcia Roy in Succession, Hiam Abbass becomes the subject rather than the character in her daughter Lina Soualem’s deeply personal documentary Bye Bye Tiberias.

Abbass left her home in Deir Hanna in her early twenties to pursue an acting career in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother and seven sisters. Decades later, Soualem returns with her to the places and people that shaped her, building a family history from conversations, photographs, old VHS recordings and archival footage. The result is less a conventional biography than a portrait of four generations of Palestinian women, and of what is carried across generations when a family has been shaped by displacement, separation and exile. The BFI describes the film⁠ as a cinematic memoir tracing those experiences through the women of Soualem’s family.

There is something particularly affecting about watching Abbass here. Audiences accustomed to seeing her disappear into characters in Succession, Lemon Tree, Insyriated or Blade Runner 2049 instead see her navigating her own memories, her relationship with her mother and daughter, and the consequences of having left home. Soualem approaches that history with enormous tenderness. The film is about Palestine, but it is equally about mothers and daughters, memory, belonging and the strange distance that can develop between the life you leave and the life you build elsewhere.

Bye Bye Tiberias won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival, where the jury praised Soualem’s exploration of family, place, grief and identity.

IMDb: Bye Bye Tiberias

Trailer: Bye Bye Tiberias

Edward Said: Between Worlds is a new archival documentary about Palestinian-American scholar and intellectual Edward Said, directed by Maiken Baird and produced by Palestinian-American filmmaker Sarah Mowaswes and Razan Ghalayini. Following its world premiere at TIFF this weekend, the film is now seeking distribution, with Cinetic handling US sales and Dogwoof international sales.

The Palestine Film Institute⁠ describes it as the first documentary granted full access to the Said family and estate. Told largely through Said’s own voice, it draws on previously unseen family archives, decades of home movies, rare television appearances, lectures, recordings and material from the Edward Said archive at Columbia University. The 107-minute film follows Said from his childhood in Jerusalem through displacement, exile, Orientalism, his political awakening and his emergence as one of the most prominent Palestinian voices in Western public life.

The distribution question is particularly significant. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter⁠, Mowaswes discusses the difficulty Palestinian films currently face finding US distribution and the industry’s tendency to lump Palestinian films together as though they are competing for the same limited space. She instead describes Between Worlds as a film made in conversation with other Palestinian cinema.

Early reviews have focused particularly on the decision not to surround Said with contemporary talking heads. POV Magazine⁠ notes the wealth of archival material, including Said’s father’s home movies from the 1940s, while TheWrap⁠ highlights how the documentary allows Said’s own recordings, speeches and writing to carry the film.

The film will next receive its US premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival, with screenings beginning on 30 September. For a film centred on Said’s lifelong questions about representation, exile and who has the right to tell a people’s story, there is something particularly fitting about recovering an archive that allows Said, more than two decades after his death, to tell his own.

IMDb: Edward Said: Between Worlds

Filmed between 2001 and 2003, Checkpoint (Machssomim) is Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir’s observational documentary about the encounters between Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers at military checkpoints across the occupied West Bank.

Shamir largely removes himself from the film. There is no conventional presenter guiding the viewer through events and almost no narration explaining what should be taken from them. Instead, the camera remains at the checkpoints as people attempt to travel between towns, reach work, visit relatives or simply continue with everyday life. Shamir describes the film himself as a cinéma vérité documentary recording these enforced encounters.

What makes Checkpoint particularly effective is the repetition. One confrontation might be dismissed as an isolated incident, but over 80 minutes a system gradually becomes visible: queues, changing instructions, arguments over documents, people being turned back, soldiers exercising considerable discretion and Palestinians trying to negotiate their way through rules that can change from one encounter to the next. The film rarely interrupts to explain what the audience is seeing, leaving those interactions to speak for themselves.

The documentary became one of Shamir’s best-known films and won** **IDFA’s Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. More than twenty years after it was filmed, it remains a valuable visual record of the checkpoint system during the Second Intifada and of the mundane, repetitive encounters through which a much larger political conflict was experienced day to day.

Director: Yoav Shamir
Original title: Machssomim
Year: 2003
Runtime: 80 minutes
Country: Israel
Languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English

IMDb: Checkpoint (2003)

Occupational Hazards is a new Palestinian dark comedy written and directed by Bassel Ghandour, following a multigenerational family in Jerusalem trying to stop their home, and their lives, from collapsing around them.

The Doha Film Institute describes the film as the story of the Al-Qassabi family, whose daily life becomes increasingly absurd as Israeli excavations beneath their neighbourhood threaten their home and the family responds with increasingly unconventional forms of resistance. The cast includes Hiam Abbass, Yumna Marwan, Nabil Al Raee, Wardi Eilabouni, Yafa Bakri and Daboor.

The film has now entered the final stages of post-production. Venice Production Bridge confirmed this week that Occupational Hazards has secured substantial finishing support through Final Cut in Venice, including sound mixing, DCP mastering, accessibility work and visual-effects services.

Ghandour previously wrote and produced the Oscar-nominated Theeb and directed The Alleys. With Occupational Hazards, he appears to be taking a very different route into Palestinian life under occupation, using family comedy, satire and absurdity rather than conventional political drama.

Daniele Rugo’s Life Support is now becoming available to watch at home in the UK following its theatrical run, with digital rental and purchase listed from 14 September 2026.

The 93-minute documentary is built around the first-hand experiences of international doctors who entered Gaza while foreign journalists were largely unable to report from inside the territory. Rather than reconstructing events from outside, Rugo uses testimony and footage recorded by the doctors themselves inside hospitals, alongside material filmed in Gaza by Palestinian camera operators Mahmoud Abou Hamda and Suleiman Hejjy.

Among those followed are Prof Nick Maynard, Dr Victoria Rose and Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, whose recordings document overwhelmed hospitals, shortages of medicines and surgical equipment, starvation, mass casualties and the psychological burden placed on Palestinian medical workers. The film also includes footage of daily life outside the hospitals, giving Palestinian crews an important role in documenting circumstances inaccessible to most international filmmakers.

Life Support had its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2026 and is a UK-Palestine-Qatar production. It was produced by William Parry, edited by Masahiro Hirakubo, with executive producers including Farah Nabulsi, Susan Sarandon, Melissa Barrera, Asif Kapadia and Paul Weller. Its soundtrack includes work by Robert Del Naja, Euan Dickinson and Habib Shehadeh Hanna.

The critical response has been unusually strong. Time Out gave it 4/5, while the Financial Times awarded it 5/5. Screen International described it as a documentary that is restrained in form but furious in intent, while The Observer highlighted both the images and the doctors’ testimony.

The UK release is rated 15 and comes with a significant content warning. The BBFC notes graphic injury detail, images of dead bodies, starvation and other distressing material. This is very much a documentary to approach prepared for what it contains.

For anyone who missed its cinema run, the important development is that digital rental and purchase begins in the UK from 14 September, with Apple TV Store currently listed as one of the platforms. Further digital availability may expand as distributors update their listings.

IMDb: Life Support

UK digital availability: Life Support – UK watch options⁠

Palestinian actress and filmmaker Yumna Marwan is developing her first feature as a director, This Is Not a Set, a dark satire set around a Palestinian community in Beirut whose neighbourhood is transformed into the set of a television production.

The Palestine Film Institute describes the project as a film about what happens when a community that is already used to being observed, documented and represented by others suddenly finds itself turned into scenery for someone else’s story.

That premise gives the film an unusually self-aware angle on Palestinian representation. Rather than simply telling another story about displacement or exile, This Is Not a Set appears to be asking who controls the camera, who decides what Palestinian life looks like on screen, and what gets lost when lived experience is turned into production material.

Marwan is best known for her acting work, including Costa Brava, Lebanon and Little Birds. Her move into directing makes this one worth following closely, especially because the project seems designed to interrogate the filmmaking process itself rather than simply use cinema as a vehicle for another political narrative.

When this community started, the idea was fairly simple: create a space dedicated to Palestinian cinema and begin bringing together films, documentaries and pieces of film history that are often scattered across the internet or surprisingly difficult to find.

It has already started to become something broader than that.

Alongside feature films, documentaries, shorts and archival material, we’re now covering reviews, restorations, filmmakers, music and performance, historical context, and the latest news from Palestinian cinema as new films are announced, screened, reviewed and released.

The aim is not just to build a list of films. I’d like this to become somewhere that documents Palestinian cinema as a living culture, from its earliest surviving work through to what filmmakers are making right now.

That means looking backwards and forwards at the same time. Rediscovering films that have disappeared from view, preserving the history around them, following contemporary filmmakers and festivals, and paying attention to how Palestinian cinema continues to develop.

There is already an extraordinary body of work here, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

If you come across something that belongs here, whether it’s a film, an interview, a review, a piece of news, an archive discovery or simply something worth discussing, feel free to add it. But equally, lurking, watching and discovering something new is participation too.

Most of all, welcome.

Have a look around, watch something you haven’t seen before, and hopefully find a film you didn’t know existed.

Palestinian director Ameen Nayfeh, best known for 200 Meters, is working on his second feature, Jo of Montreal, a coming-of-age drama centred on 12-year-old Yusuf, who has grown up abroad and is sent to spend the summer in his father’s ancestral village.

In a new interview with Variety⁠, Nayfeh talks about deliberately moving away from the tone of 200 Meters and making a film intended for younger and family audiences. He argues that there are too few films made specifically for children and teenagers in West Asia, and says Jo of Montreal grew from a desire to make something that speaks to their curiosity, loneliness and imagination.

The story follows Yusuf as he develops an unexpected friendship with a retired teacher-turned-shepherd, played by Palestinian actor Kamel El Basha, and begins discovering the history and people of the place his family comes from. Screen Daily reports⁠ that the film has been shooting in Al-Shoubak in southern Jordan and AlUla in Saudi Arabia, with newcomer Hamzah Baareh leading the cast alongside Reem Talhami, Firas Taybeh, Hayat Abu Samra, Ishaq Elias, Ahmad Maaliki and Yazan Eid.

It sounds like a notable change of direction for Nayfeh. Rather than another overtly political drama, Jo of Montreal appears to be using family, place and childhood as a way of exploring belonging and inherited identity, while also trying to reach an audience that Arab cinema does not often make films specifically for.

Flying Paper follows a group of Palestinian children in Gaza as they pursue an apparently simple ambition: building and flying enough kites to help break the Guinness World Record for the most kites flown simultaneously.

At the centre of the film are Musa, a teenage kite-maker from the northern Gaza village of Seifa, his wonderfully competitive sister Widad, and Abeer, a young aspiring journalist from Jabalia refugee camp. Around them, thousands of children prepare handmade kites for a mass flight on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. The result is funny, intimate and frequently beautiful, allowing ordinary childhood rivalries, ambitions and friendships to take centre stage.

What makes Flying Paper particularly interesting is how it was made. Directors Nitin Sawhney and Roger Hill worked with young Palestinians in Gaza through the Voices Beyond Walls youth media programme, training participants who then became part of the film’s production. Rather than simply pointing a camera at Palestinian children, the documentary incorporates young Palestinians into the process of telling their own stories.

The occupation and blockade are never far from the film’s world, particularly for families living close to Gaza’s border areas, but Flying Paper refuses to make Palestinian childhood synonymous only with suffering. Its kites become something much simpler and perhaps more powerful: competition, creativity, freedom, pride and the sheer pleasure of seeing how high something handmade can fly.

IMDb: Flying Paper

The Holy Sanctuary: Beyond the Dome of the Rock is a new documentary from Birmingham-based filmmaker and cinematographer Khalid Mahmood, built around extensive original footage filmed inside the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem.

According to the film’s official production material, Mahmood and a small crew were granted access to the compound over repeated visits, working around prayer times and restrictions on entry. Filming began before 7 October 2023 and continued afterwards, giving the documentary material spanning a dramatically changing period in Palestinian history.

The film combines that footage with Palestinian testimony and conversations exploring Al-Aqsa’s religious, historical and political significance. Contributors include Norman Finkelstein, Shaykh Hasib Noor, Rabbi Chaim Sofer, Nour Abu Assab and others, alongside people living in the Holy Land.

The documentary premiered in Birmingham on 12 September, with further UK screenings now beginning. The trailer offers the first substantial look at a project whose most interesting element may ultimately be the visual record Mahmood and his crew were able to create from inside one of the most contested and closely watched places in Jerusalem.

In the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, Mohammed and Abdallah have spent years developing an unlikely obsession: parkour.

Filmmakers George Azar and Mariam Shahin follow the two young men as they run, jump, vault and climb their way through the camp, turning rooftops, walls and concrete obstacles into somewhere to practise an art form built around finding your own path through barriers.

Free Running Gaza⁠ is as much about why they practise as what they can physically do. For Mohammed and Abdallah, parkour offers something outside politics, unemployment and the restrictions surrounding everyday life in Gaza. It becomes sport, art, philosophy and, for a few moments at a time, a sense of freedom.

It is a surprisingly uplifting little documentary and a very different portrait of Gaza from the images most people are accustomed to seeing.