Palestine through Film

Palestine through Film chronicles key moments in Palestinian history—from the Nakba of 1948 to the present occupation. These weekly screenings of documentaries, historical dramas, and shorts open a window onto the mosaic of life in Palestine. In this installment of the series, graduate students Nadine Fattalleh (NYU) and Kaleem Hawa (Columbia) present three short films of resistance, followed by a Q&A.

Mustafa Abu Ali, SCENES FROM THE OCCUPATION OF GAZA (1973, 13 minutes)
Shot by a French news team, the footage was then edited by Mustafa Abu Ali in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Experimental editing techniques produced a cinematically and politically subversive film, by one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic art of the Palestinian revolution.

Mustafa Abu Ali, A ZIONIST AGGRESSION (1973, 21 minutes)
A small group of Palestinian militants attacked the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. In retaliation, the Israeli military launched raids against Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. In this short film, legendary Palestinian filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali reaches for new filmic grammar to reflect on the brutality of the raids. Silence accounts for over half of the film’s soundtrack, as if no words are left to contend with the extent of depravity and destruction.

Mohammad Malas, THE DREAM (1987, 45 minutes)
Filming in Lebanon in 1980–81, Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas traveled to Palestinian refugee camps, meeting many of his interview subjects in their homes, neighborhoods, and the vocational workshops led by the Palestine Martyrs Works Society (SAMED). There, Malas asked the Palestinians about their dreams. What emerges in the documentary is not a portrait of grim determinism or evacuated humanitarianism. Instead, Malas’s film speaks to how memories of the Arab resistance enter into a quotidian unconscious and how the martyrs and their sacrifices continue to haunt memory in the camps. After the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, the work of the Israeli-backed Phalange militia, Malas’s film acquired a new urgency. He recalls meeting the refugees in his own sleep: “I know they are dead, I see them in my dreams.”

Content warning: This film program contains real footage of graphic violence, human suffering, and the bodies of deceased individuals, including babies and children.

Cosponsored by Film and Media Studies