Palestinian films: a little-known treasure

We must be honest: when we started the Leeds Palestinian Film Festival, we had probably seen about 10 Palestinian films in total. Little did we know what a rich heritage awaited us.

We didn’t know that Palestinians were making films in the 1930s and that the Arab Film Company was established in 1945 in Jerusalem to further assist and promote filmmakers in Palestine.

There is little surprise that this blossoming movement was thwarted by the Nakba in 1948, when at least 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, losing their homes and land, and 75,000 lost their lives, during the creation of the state of Israel.

The recent film Palestine 1936 shows how Palestinians feared for and campaigned against the loss of their land at a time when Britain had the Mandate in Palestine.

We were also unsurprised to discover that these early films were lost, much like most Palestinian books were lost and stolen from the homes of Palestinians who were forced to flee, as documented in the film The Great Book Robbery (which you can view for free on YouTube).

After the Nakba, Palestinian films were made in exile, in surrounding countries where Palestinian refugees had fled. Having to flee your home and land without recompense, left with only what you could carry, filmmaking inevitably came long after trying to make a new life and home. So very few films were made in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Things changed with the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the late 1960s and other Palestinian organisations. The PLO set up a film unit and archive, making over 60 films up until 1982. These were mainly documentaries focusing on the injustices Palestinians faced and calls for justice.

In 1982, when the PLO was forced out of Beirut, the archive mysteriously disappeared.  Apparently, some of these films were located in the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) archive.

However, these films had been reproduced for international audiences and, over the years, many of them – on original reels – have been located and digitised. We were delighted to show a 1983 PLO documentary, The Bride and the Dowry, which was presented by the director Ibrahim Abu Nab’s granddaughter, who had converted the old reel version to a digital format.

The rebirth of Palestinian filmmaking was well underway, both within Palestine and in “the diaspora”, outside of the filmmakers' original homeland.

As well as documentaries, some filmmakers began making feature films, like Michel Khleifi’s 1987 film Wedding in Galilee, exploring rich cultural traditions and life under occupation (where breaking a nighttime curfew is negotiated by allowing IDF soldiers to a wedding!).

Occupation became an inevitable theme in films about the Palestinian experience in the West Bank. Forget road movies, welcome to road block movies. In Leila’s Birthday, the famous actor Mohammad Bakri played a taxi driver who faced a series of disruptions in the simple task of trying to return home on time with his daughter’s birthday cake.

Director Elia Sulieman used his characteristic surreal comedy to show the absurd nature of the occupation, with a balloon carrying the image of a smiling Yasser Arafat floating over a checkpoint, the military unable to stop it in the 2002 film Divine Intervention. Farah Nabulsi’s short film The Present showed how a simple shopping trip can become a nightmare if a checkpoint is involved.

Palestinians from the diaspora have also made some great contributions. Anne Marie Jacir’s 2008 Salt of this Sea is a drama about an American-born Palestinian woman who heads to Israel and Palestine to try and reclaim her family's home and money that were taken in 1948.

Meanwhile, US Palestinian director Cherien Dabis's third feature film, made in 2025, All That's Left of You showed how massive changes since 1948 have impacted generations of a Palestinian family.

We must also mention the Palestinian and Israeli film collaborations, notably No Other Land, which was made in 2024 by a Palestinian-Israeli collective struggling against mass expulsion during the Israeli occupation of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.

Filmmaking in Gaza has been more difficult, especially as the strip has been under siege since 2005. Indeed, the best-known films have been made by internationals. The 2019 Gaza documentary was made by two Irish filmmakers, Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell.

Since the large-scale killing of tens of thousands and the widespread bombing of most of the buildings in Gaza, journalists and individuals have been filming, often using mobile phones, recording accounts of their brutal circumstances, such as From Ground Zero.

This year, our festival will showcase new films by women in Gaza learning filmmaking with international support and online training from other filmmakers through the 2026-founded Gaza Film Academy.  

We have just scratched the surface of Palestinian film here, but we hope we have whetted your appetite for a genre that struggles to be seen in the UK. These films, in their diversity, help us understand Palestinian culture, history and everyday lives, going beyond the headlines and the usual stereotypes.

The 2026 Leeds Palestinian Film Festival runs from November 13– December 6. The Palestinian Film Club is also screening films at the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford.