In an essay on the militant films of the Palestine Film Unit for The New York Review of Books, critic Kaleem Hawa writes that “Palestinian cinema has always been saddled with the psychic weight of colonization . . . Film offers liberatory possibilities, then: with the projection of moving images onto a screen, a people can imagine something different, something other.”

This week on the podcast, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Kaleem (who’s also a Film Comment contributor) to discuss our recent home-viewing—which, as it turned out, included a lot of Palestinian cinema. From the agitprop of Mustafa Abu Ali’s 1974 film They Do Not Exist, to the diasporic longing of Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza (2013), to the biting satire and media criticism of Elia Suleiman, the conversation covered a lot of fascinating ground. See below for links to the movies.

Links & Things:
Kaleem Hawa on the history of the Palestine Film Unit in The New York Review of Books
Palestine Censored,” a series curated by Kaleem for This Light Actually
The Palestine Film Institute
They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974)
Films by Basma Alsharif, Larissa Sansour, and others streaming for free in Another Screen’s For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women series
Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)
Introduction to the End of an Argument (Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum, 1990)
An Unusual Summer (Kamal Aljafari, 2020)
Arab American National Musuem’s free virtual Elia Suleiman retrospective and talkback
An interview with Basma Alsharif in BOMB Magazine