'Cinema is liberation': as more acclaimed films about Palestine emerge, why are many still fighting to reach an audience?

“We have no cinemas in Gaza,” says the wry, off-screen voice of a hired driver in the new Palestine documentary The Mission. “This is the only action you get.” 

He’s referring to a brawl breaking out on the road in front of them, where traders attempting to enter besieged North Gaza have been set upon by looters, and UN peacekeepers are firing weapons to disperse the crowd. 

If both the driver and his passengers seem unperturbed, that’s because this is only the latest obstacle to land in the path of British-Iraqi surgeon Dr Mohammed Tahir, as he attempts to deliver urgently needed medical care under near-constant Israeli bombardment. And The Mission, which follows Tahir inside Gaza’s operating rooms, is only the latest pertinent, courageous, soul-searing film to seek passage from the heart of the occupation to a global audience.

When No Other Land, a film about the forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, won Best Documentary at the Oscars earlier this year, it felt like the world would finally pay attention. The film had already found a large audience across Europe, having been picked up by multiple distributors, including Dogwoof in the UK, following its world premiere at the Berlin film festival in February 2024. Yet being awarded Hollywood’s highest accolade did not help the film secure a distributor for release in the US; instead, it was self-released in cinemas (eventually making $2.5m at the US box office). Last month, No Other Land’s makers announced they would also self-release for home viewing in the US, with co-director Basel Adra commenting that the truth contained within their film “apparently didn’t fit the narrative that big US streamers wanted to promote.” 

While all this has been going on in the foreground, in the background No Other Land’s makers have been subject to multiple attacks, including one instance in March this year when co-director Hamdan Ballal was left with head injuries after his West Bank home was attacked by armed settlers; he was then kidnapped from an ambulance by IDF soldiers and detained for a day. In July this year, Awdah Hathaleen, a consultant on the film, was fatally shot by Israeli settlers. 

Despite the struggle to get No Other Land made and distributed, and the backlash to its success, the drive to make films about Palestine continues, with several films recently released or due out in the coming months. As well as documentaries depicting the current dire circumstances in Gaza, such as The Mission (on UK-wide release in January) and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (currently streaming), there are the epic historical dramas All That’s Left of You by Cherien Dabis (premiering at the London Palestine Film Festival on 28 November) about a Palestinian family over several generations, and Palestine 36 (out today), about the 1936–39 uprising against British colonial rule. 

Others, somewhat controversially, blend genres in pursuit of a deeper truth, such as Oscar-tipped docufiction The Voice of Hind Rajab (out 16 January in the UK), which follows the Red Crescent response to the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl using a real-life recording of her final call for help; and last year’s From Ground Zero (now streaming), an anthology of 22 short films made by young Palestinians which was reportedly ditched from the Cannes film festival at the last minute on political grounds. And if that does sound too “political” for you, why not try taut, popcorn-y, genre thrillers Once Upon a Time in Gaza (screening this month at the London Palestine film festival), about a man avenging his friend’s murder, and To a Land Unknown (now streaming), about a pair of Palestinian refugees in Athens? Both are political only in the sense that they acknowledge the current reality of Palestinian lives. 

This raft of new releases might suggest a Palestinian film industry in rude health, but the reality is very different. While the majority of these films eventually secured distribution deals for release in the US, all but one signed with Watermelon Pictures, a company set up in April 2024 by a pair of Palestinian-American brothers specifically to plug this stubborn gap in the US market. Exceptionally, The Voice of Hind Rajab will be distributed in the US by Willa, a small, socially conscious independent, after two months in distribution limbo. That’s highly unusual for a critically acclaimed, award-garlanded film, which received a 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival (17 minutes longer than Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Lion winner Father Mother Sister Brother). Major and mid-level distribution companies remain very wary of Palestinian cinema, while the fact that a mooted deal between No Other Land and hipster London-based platform Mubi fell apart this month over the streamer’s links to an Israeli defence tech company further illustrates the issue’s knottiness.  

“There's a climate of fear,” says Sophie Monks Kaufman, a film critic and co-founder of the Cinema For Gaza initiative. “The Israeli perspective is entrenched in all instruments of power, from governments through to any given operation in the film industry.” 

Kaufman is one of five people behind Cinema For Gaza, a “collective fundraising space that makes it straightforward for people to show solidarity [for Palestine] who hadn't necessarily found the words yet”. In April last year, Cinema For Gaza held an auction, including lots donated by such luminaries as Mike Leigh, Tilda Swinton and Josh O’Connor. They raised over a quarter of a million pounds for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). “And yet the occupation grinds on,” says Kaufman. “So there's only so proud you can be.”

The general cravenness of the international film community also stands in stark contrast to the awe-inspiring bravery displayed by individuals in these films. “They come with cameras and the soldiers come with guns,” says Kaufman simply. This means the way forward for the rest of us is also relatively straightforward: “Just grow a pair, really…There’s no reason, apart from cowardice and philistinism, not to programme great Palestinian films, or distribute them.”

Of course distribution, festival screenings and awards recognition are all secondary concerns to shooting the film in the first place. “No film I’ve ever made before comes close to the challenges of making a film during this ongoing genocide,” says The Mission’s producer, Mike Lerner, an experienced, Academy Award-nominated documentarian whose previous subjects include Russian feminist protest group Pussy Riot, the war in Afghanistan and the Arab Spring. “The particular challenge for those in the field is simply staying alive under the most horrific conditions imaginable, and shooting a film whilst treating the injured and dying,” he says. “I will forever be grateful for their courage and defiance.” 

Palestine 36, a 1930s-set historical drama providing a long-overdue illustration of Britain’s role in precipitating the current crisis, nearly had to be abandoned several times during production. Yet Annemarie Jacir, the film’s Palestinian writer-director, persisted. “I’ve been working for 25 years now in Palestine, and every single film I’ve been involved in – and every single Palestinian film I haven’t been involved in – they are all little miracles,” she says. “This has been a miracle. All the conditions and hardships of independent cinema, not having support, and on top of that, making films under a military occupation, in a place where everything is forbidden; just being Palestinian is forbidden. That’s why [there is] the creativity, the insistence to find solutions for everything.”

These conditions mean that many of the films about Palestine which find a platform are directed by film-makers from other countries in collaboration with Palestinians on the ground. This was the case for 2025 documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which was made possible through a series of video calls between director Sepideh Farsi, an Iranian exile, and 24-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona. 

Farsi’s own background meant she had experience of what she calls “emergency film-making” long before beginning work on this project. Since first picking up a camera as a 16-year-old in early 1980s Tehran, she has been imprisoned, smuggled film-making equipment over the Afghan border and had her camera – and nearly her head – smashed up by Ayatollah Khomeini’s paramilitary basijis. Still, Farsi insists on an important distinction: “I'm aware that the risks that I take from here [currently Paris] are incomparable with the risks that Palestinians take in collaborating with us. Palestinians are the ones taking the real risks.” This truth was horrifically, bluntly demonstrated when, on 16 April, Hassona, Farsi’s collaborator and subject, was killed, along with several members of her family, in a targeted Israeli airstrike. Hassona’s death came a day after the film was selected for the Cannes film festival, and just months before her wedding day.

How are Palestinian film-makers and their allies able to persevere when the stakes are so unfathomably high? And when the role that cinema might play in the liberation of Palestine is, at best, unclear? Because, says Jacir, “cinema is liberation. Cinema is a way to find freedom, create freedom, to be free. Our people don’t have freedom, but there is a freedom in the work; to create and to have no boundaries and borders and blockades controlling your life.”

And while there may be "no cinemas in Gaza" (the last permanently operating movie theatres were destroyed or closed down in the late 1980s), remarkably – miraculously – film culture endures. At time of writing, the first ever Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema is underway in Gaza City, having opened on 26 October with a screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab. In among the rubble of destroyed homes and hospitals, even amid the recommenced bombings of the supposed Israeli “ceasefire”, films are being shown. As Jacir says: “What is inside of us, as humans, cannot be controlled. That is the freedom I find in cinema.”

The London Palestine film festival 2025 runs from 14 to 28 November

Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. She recently wrote about the diminishing returns of music biopics