Palestine: Story of a Land

A video project meant to highlight the human cost in Palestine.

Assassinated Lebanese intellectual Mahdi Amel — often dubbed “the Arab Gramsci” — famously said: “He who resists is never defeated.” What use is his thought to us today, and what is our responsibility as image makers to Gaza?

In July 1987, Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al Ali was shot by an unknown assassin. This documentary traces his life and work from his birth in Galilee to his death in London. It examines the forces that shaped Naj Al Ali as an artist and as a human being and shows how his experiences mirrored those of other exiled Palestinians.

A drama centered on an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war who finds herself drawn into the conflict.

A freedom fighter's journey from armed resistance to cultural resistance.

While millions of birds migrate freely in the skies above, Fadia, a Palestinian refugee stranded in Lebanon, yearns for the ancestral homeland she is denied. When a chance meeting introduces her to the director, Sarah, she challenges her to find an ancient mulberry tree that once grew next to her grandfather’s house in historic Palestine, a tree that stands witness to her family’s existence.

In the region of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, Palestinians are being subjected to ethnic cleansing. Homes that have been passed down since the days of their grandparents are being reduced to rubble by bulldozers. Families who have lived by farming olive trees are forcibly displaced, and Israeli settlements are built in their place. Under international law, these acts are clear violations, yet they continue unabated. In the space of this grotesque violence—where Palestinian homes are demolished to make way for Israeli settlements—there is a familiar logo affixed to the heavy machinery. It belongs to HD Hyundai, one of South Korea's largest conglomerates. Suddenly, what once felt like a distant geopolitical issue jump-cuts into our lives—right to our doorstep.

Two Cameras for Palestine

Building on Forensic Architecture’s previous investigation into herbicidal warfare and its effects on Palestinian farmers along the eastern perimeter of the occupied Gaza Strip, this investigation marks Land Day in Palestine by examining the systematic targeting of orchards and greenhouses by Israeli forces since October 2023. Our analysis reveals that this destruction is a widespread and deliberate act of ecocide that has exacerbated the ongoing catastrophic famine in Gaza and is part of a wider pattern of deliberately depriving Palestinians of critical resources for survival.

In this video, the artist tries to overcome the effects of distance, and reflects on geography represented in exile due to war, and on the psychological distance represented in each one’s approach to her womanhood. The video beautifully weaves personal images and audio recordings of a very intimate nature, binding the personal with the political. Reading aloud from letters sent by her mother in Beirut, Hatoum creates a visual montage reflecting her feelings of separation and isolation from her Palestinian family. The personal and political are inextricably bound in a narrative that explores personal and family identity against a backdrop of traumatic social rupture, exile and displacement.

Mawtini

Poetry is everywhere, even in the refugee camps where absolute misery reigns. In front of old plastic advertising posters on which are drawn in giant format the big icons of luxury and consumerism that make up their shelters, refugee children stand like kings. Symbols of life at the heart of war, fragility, and death, these children are shown by Jocelyne Saab as precious notes of hope in the heart of a dehumanized world. One Dollar a Day was filmed in the Syrian refugee camps of the Bekaa plain, Lebanon in 2015, with text by Etel Adnan.

“In Gaza you have to get there in the evening, in spring, lock yourself in your room and from there listen to the sounds coming in through the open window.... It's 2018. I am 25 years old and a foreign traveler. I meet young Palestinians my age..”

An attempt to express the daily experience of Palestinians excluded by an apartheid regime, exploring various aspects of the Israeli occupation. Through narratives from four different regions of Palestine, it culminates in a collective narrative of Palestinian resistance as an everyday act of survival and struggle.

Featuring interviews with 20 prominent voices and filmed using two iPhone 16s over the spring and summer of 2025, this easily digestible educational tool for curious audiences explores Palestinian resistance and the movement’s ties to justice movements around the world.

The true story of 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was separated from her mother and trapped in a car under heavy attack in Gaza surrounded by an Israeli tank in January 2024.

Structured in chapters, the film moves from the aftermath of the 1967 war to mass demonstrations and training grounds, where men, women, and children practice survival and resistance. The camera’s proximity, switching between black-and-white and colour, treats cinema as witness, archive, and rallying cry.

An examination of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 through to the present day. A semi-biographic film, in four chapters, about a family spanning from 1948 until recent times. Combined with intimate memories of each member, the film attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained in their land and were labelled "Israeli-Arabs," living as a minority in their own homeland.

Something from there is a short film on the substance of our original lands. Weaving between the voices of the artist’s parents, one a refugee and the other not, the film is personal, yet evokes a shared Palestinian experience.

An Iranian filmmaker participates in a series of video calls with a young Palestinian photojournalist who describes her life confined in Gaza during the current regional conflict.