myDylarama

Ish - Heartfelt and refreshingly Luton-based authentic portrait of a friendship between two young Muslim boys

Allie L.D. — 2026-08-11T20:52:24Z

The description of Ish as a film about "the British Muslim experience" ellicited a sigh, conjuring images of a patronising, reductive, box-ticking exercise, laden with cliches (a radicalised teen, an overbearing parent, some tussle about a headscarf...). And so, pre-emptively dejected, I sat down to a preview ... and was moved to tears by the nuanced, honest, and sensitive depiction of a relationship between two young boys. It was fresh and authentic, and (for once!) depicted how Muslim teens with very different origins but dealing with a similar reality in Britain actively engage with the geopolitical context they're growing up in - instead of purely being subjected to it.

The film is set in Luton in the Summer. Close friends British-Palestinian Maram and British-Bangladeshi Ish are making the most of those long, lazy days on the cusp of teenagehood, still enjoying their childhood antics of building dens and picking blackberries but dealing with grief (Ish's mother's recently died), processing devastating world events (they watch the genocide in Gaza unfold on their phones), navigating the trials of adolescence (Maram gravitates towards older kids, occasionally getting into trouble). Things unravel after Maram is quite brutally bundled into an unmarked van and subjected to a stop and search interrogation.

The partly autobiographical film is based on visual artist and filmmaker Imran Perretta's own experience of being stopped and searched by police aged 13. The traumatising event led him to explore the post 9/11 climate of increased Islamophobia through film.

It's uncommon to see a British Palestinian boy on screen, especially in a film that isn't about Palestine. Muslim leads and characters tend to understandably and generally be South Asian. The Palestinian community in Britain is relatively small. One of the film's many strengths is to avoid flattening the "Muslim experience" and reflect the fact that these children have distinct origins and cultural backgrounds. And yet, by growing up in a similar environment, they forge another identity, shaped by the material reality of being Muslim, in Luton, in the specific post-2023 geopolitical environment. Perretta deftly brings depicts the complexity of this experience.

Interestingly, Perretta didn't specifically seek out a Palestinian actor to portray Aram, despite references to the Gaza genocide already written in the script. The fact that it the character ends up having such a personal connection to Palestine was very simply due to the strength of actor Yahya's performance during the casting process. A process that took six months, with 900 autioning for the role. Perretta was exremely impressed by Yahya's audition and by the chemistry between himself and Ish: the two young actors had masterfully kept secret the fact that they in fact had been friends since nursery!

The film was released in the UK in July 2026. Highly recommended.

Ghost in the Machine - Absolute must-watch deep dive into so-called AI

Abla Kandalaft — 2026-06-12T18:33:52Z

Writing for the Sundance Institute website, Erik Adams calls Valerie Veatch's Ghost in the Machine "the scariest movie playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival". He's not wrong. It's not only scary, it's also rage-inducing.

Veatch traces the red line that links the current "AI " tools and the exploitative and polluting tech giants behind them to the eugenists of the 19th and early 20th century - a rag tag bunch of mediocre men who took it upon themselves to quantify human intelligence - highlighting how machine learning and the technological developments that have helped it flourish emerged from racist and supremacist models for the exploitation of people and resources. Pieced together in a way that brings to mind Adam Curtis' long-form docs, the film throws a lot of information and talking heads our way but allows us visualise the way all these threads are interconnected: the racist mathematicians and theorists, the birth and growth of Silicon Valley, today's tech bros and their unicorn AI models, and - credit to Veatch for shedding light on one facet that's too often ignored - the very human (exploitative) labour in countries like Kenya that actually provides the backbone of what we think of as artificial intelligence.

One of the most salient points made by this doc is that there is nothing intelligent about machine learning. AI is nothing more than a buzz word coined by scientist John McCarthy in the mid-20th century to make his research more attractive to potential funders. To this day, artificial intelligence remains an entirely theoretical concept used to upsell pattern recognition programmes for feckless millionaires to pour more money into. The bubble is sure to burst but not before the water-guzzling data centres are built, thousands more workers in the poorest countries are exploited and the rest of us lose some of our critical faculties.

Much of the doc makes us feel quite hopeless. Maybe it should be complemented by a look at what's happening in the East. With the geopolitical shift to Asia come variables and potential breaks to this madness. But Veatch does end on a call to action. Our destiny isn't written in stone, our future is not predetermined and is still for us to shape. She encourages us to push for regulation, to avoid automation when we can, and to invest in community cohesion and human connection.

The film is out in the UK June 2026.

Cinematic Rebellion: From Los Angeles to Palestine

Mydylarama team — 2026-05-15T12:57:41Z

"This film is built off of truth and rich history. Behind this film are piles of personal stories, family histories, settler-colonial history, and folkloric Palestinian oral stories that existed pre-1948. As part of the diaspora, grandparents and elders serve as a direct line to Palestine. With that generation disappearing, a new, stronger connection is being developed. Behind that connection exists a flourishing fusion of oral histories, family relics, embroidery, epigenetics, and traditions, essentially everything behind an indigenous existence that is adapting to its modern surroundings."

Reem Jubran's UCLA thesis film sees a young Palestinian woman whisked away through time from present day California to 1936 Ramallah, after diving into a secluded swimming pool. Don't Be Long, Little Bird is born of Reem Jubran's desire to speak to her grandmother and preserve a heritage that has been so vulnerable to constant displacement and attempts at erasure. Reem is keen to stress the need for the Palestinian diaspora to preserve cultural memory and celebrates the efforts and sacrifices of previous generations who have fought to keep that connection between Palestinians and their ancestral homeland alive.

The film is screening in London, at ArtHouse Crouch End, as part of a programme called Cinematic Rebellion: From Los Angeles to Palestine.

Don't Be Long, Little Bird is paired with LA Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement (2025, 56m). Following the Watts Riots of 1965, UCLA filmmaking students pushed to increase enrollment of Black students on to the course. "L.A Rebellion" refers these efforts that led the group to create an alternative, independent Black cinema that more adequately reflected the struggles faced by Black communities. The programme highlights the connection between the two cohorts of filmmaking students reappropriating storytelling as a central component of both cultural legacy and liberation movements.

The screening will be held on 5 June, 20:15 followed by a live panel discussion, including director Reem Jubran. Tickets and info here.

Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2026

carrie — 2026-02-01T10:22:18Z

Europe's largest (and the world's second largest) film festival back, nestled in the heart of France's wild, volcanic region of the Massif Central. Its international competition, made up of 12 programmes of shorts, is one of the richest platforms for storytelling from around the world. The accessibility and relatively low cost of short filmmaking allow for breadth of voices that can't be matched by feature film festivals. The more experimental films are given a competition all to themselves - the Lab. On top of which are special programmes, thematic screenings, exhibitions... so much to fill the hefty catalogue the 200,000 festival attendees are lugging and anottating day in day out.

This year's geographical focus is South East Asia. Festival regular, Filipino director Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan is back. Festival moderator and writer Elise Loiseau has written this in-depth piece on his work - and this edition's masterclass will be with Vietnamese-French director Tran Anh Hung (The Taste of Things, The Smell of the Green Papaya).

There is so much going on, there's hardy any point trying to capture the highlights. But a few of the perks that sets Clermont apart include: a fairly exhaustive programme squarely aimed at children (from 4!), filmmaking and film craft workshops (free!), side exhibitions (all around the town!), and a massive film market (pitch your feature!). Every year, the festival team arranges for the Palestinian film delegation to come and present the consistently and astoundingly strong films made and produced by Palestinian filmmakers in the preceding 12 months.

We'll be back with a few choice Q&As... Watch this space.

Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan : What it means to listen

Elise Loiseau — 2026-02-01T10:07:01Z

In the space of four years, the Filipino director has made his mark with his intimate and luminous short films. Discovered in France in 2021 at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, he has consolidated his reputation on the global short film circuit with the release of Vox Humana, and is still at the forefront of the cinematic representation of the indigenous peoples of the northern Philippine archipelago, where he was born.

Platforming stories that need to be told

In four films, Umbilical Cord to Heaven (2021), Hilum (2021), The Headhunter's Daughter (2022) and Vox Humana (2024), Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan has defined his recognisable style through recurring formal elements: the use of natural light, square frames, and the hazy quality of his images. The combination of this formal beauty and the evocation of themes that are both intimate and political has won over the most prestigious festivals: in Clermont-Ferrand, Hilum won the student prize and a special mention in 2021, and Vox Humana won the student prize in 2025. As for The Headhunter's Daughter, it won the coveted Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, amongst other awards. Prior to that, his first short film, Umbilical Cord to Heaven, won the CineYouth Best Experimental Film Award at the 55th Chicago International Film Festival in 2019.

This recognition from the industry and the public celebrates a unique voice that draws inspiration from both personal and historical trauma. His films evoke mourning and the colonial experience, and tell the story of the precarious situation of indigenous peoples, whose identities have been undermined over the centuries by successive colonisations, first Spanish, then American. [1] These films draw their strength from their tranquil pace, their meditative quality, and the resolute message humbly conveyed by their director, who identifies nature, spirituality, and cinema as powerful saving forces capable of restoring his heroines' capacity for self-determination.

His relationship with his indigenous identity is, in part, the subject matter of his films: he became aware of this after spending several years in the West. Eblahan was born in La Trinidad in the Philippines, grew up mainly in the Baguio region, then left the archipelago for four years to study film in Chicago. However, before embarking on a career as a filmmaker, it was music that first appealed to him: coming from a family of musicians, he learned to play the guitar and compose long before he became interested in cinema. The turning point came with Rob Marshall's film Nine, when, captivated by its soundtrack, Don researched the film and its story, discovering Fellini's Eight and a Half (which inspired Nine), then Italian and French cinema, and so on. This led him to leave the archipelago to study film at DePaul University in Chicago. Years away from the archipelago gave rise to a desire to recount, through the prism of autofiction, his experience as an Igorot trying to find his place in a Westernised world:

Being in the West has held up a mirror towards myself, perhaps instigating a reason to be more inquisitive about my own identity, the history of the land/or islands I grew up in, and the interpersonal and spiritual voices that call for their stories to be told.

As told to Jason Tan Liwag for Rappler.

Conveying the complexity of indigenous identities

This is one of the main challenges facing cinema, which also exists in response to a form of media mistreatment of indigenous identities and has set itself the task of challenging this representation:

The intersection between Indigenous identities and TV hasn't always been the friendliest (even Philippine TV) — from caricatured portrayals to insensitive remarks about our culture.

As told to Jason Tan Liwag for Rappler.

Given the precedent set by this, Don writes his main characters – all female for now – imbued with complexity, such as Lynn, the heroine of The Headhunter's Daughter, who crosses mountains to reach the city to perform in a television competition, hoping to be heard by her father. The staging hints at the stigmatisation suffered by indigenous people, through the condescending questions asked by the competition host. Lynn's response, that her motivation is not money, contradicts this stereotype:

The fact that Lynn is questioned so directly on screen draws attention to our media's tendency to sensationalize otherness, tragedy, sentimentality, and misery in the lives of Indigenous Filipinos. I wanted to give my protagonist a different response and perspective to this cyclical trend. Lynn's choice to approach her audition in that way reveals a hidden resilience that, I believe, was necessary in that situation.

As told to Élise Loiseau.

Eblahan's cinema does not merely renew the representation of indigenous communities in the northern Philippine archipelago, it places it within a broader narrative, that of the struggle against the erasure of cultural identities and the marginalization of indigenous communities. The Headhunter's Daughter does not open with images but with a song, inspired by a traditional song of African slaves, immediately placing the film in a universe that transcends the condition of the indigenous Filipino characters: "I wanted this historical context to be introduced at the beginning of the film, even before the first images appeared. Establishing this context before the film even appears on screen sets the stage, encouraging the audience to listen more attentively and perhaps situate themselves in a historical and sociological space before the story even begins.

I wanted this historical context to be introduced from the very beginning, even before any visuals are seen. To linger around this context before the film emerges from the black screen sets a precedent that urges participation with the audience to listen closer and perhaps situate themselves in a historical and sociological headspace before we introduce any direct narrative

From Rappler.

A way of bringing his roots to the global cinema stage, while placing them in a broader context, that of the domination and dehumanisation of entire population groups. His cinema consists not only of bringing these mechanisms of domination to life on screen, but also of exploiting the cinematic codes associated with different genres in order to subvert the traditional representation of indigenous peoples, which is considered either stereotypical or condescending:

Films about indigenous peoples, made by indigenous people, can be thrillers, westerns, science fiction films (...) We too have complex stories that we have to deal with while living in the modern world. We are not just “savages” or victims of colonisation. We exist, and we too can look cool in trench coats.

From Techbuzznews.

Hilum and Vox Humana: listening as an act of reparation

A recurring theme in her filmography is that listening to others is presented as a powerful voice of emancipation and healing, whether it be in relation to grief, the quest for recognition, or the erasure of cultures that haunt her heroines. This was already central to her second film, Hilum, whose meaning is contained in the polysemy of its title:

Hilum is a Filipino word that translates differently in two dialects. In Cebuano it means “to render silence”, while in Tagalog it means “to heal an open wound”. The connection between the two meanings is the essential element of the film.' Hilum is a Filipino word that translates differently in two dialects. In Cebuano it means “to render silence”, in Tagalog it means “to heal an open wound”. The connection of both meanings is the important binding force of the film.

Don Rafael Josephus Eblahan

It is indeed silence and the attentive listening of a shaman that seem to heal the strange illness afflicting the heroine of the short film, who regains her ability to shed tears after recounting the accident that cost her father his life. This ritual combining listening and narration takes place on a beach, under a blinding sun, in an atmosphere reminiscent of a mystical EMDR session (the shaman asks the heroine to accompany the story of the accident with eye movements from right to left).

In Vox Humana, Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan continues his reflection on listening, making attention to others an act of reparation. The film, shot with a crew of just fifteen people over three days in the Cordillera mountains, takes up and develops this same idea, this time embodying it in the form of a sound engineer tasked with deciphering the language of a man discovered in the wild, who is suspected of being responsible for an earthquake. The film borrows from the codes of detective and science fiction films, while also exploring listening to others and nature as possible ways of resolving trauma. This time, it highlights the mechanism of exclusion suffered by communities perceived as ‘incomprehensible' or even ‘non-human':

We wanted to make a film about the language of listening: listening to the earth, to individuals, and even to “non-human” creatures. Through the question of sound, I wanted to explore this concept of “non-human”, particularly how this notion can be used as a weapon against marginalised populations whose land and rights are often confiscated.

From Rappler

The director is currently working on his next film, Hum, his first feature film currently in development. This project will be loosely based on the myth of the indigenous Ifugaos tribe entitled the myth of Ovug (or ‘myth of the divided child') and will feature a rodeo rider searching for her twin who disappeared in the forest after an earthquake. It promises to be an extension of his short films: a poetic fiction, where the intimate and the political come together in a meditation on collective memory, trauma and the survival of indigenous Filipino identities, which should allow Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan to continue weaving stories of these heroines into the collective narrative of the Philippines and world cinema.

[1] The Philippine archipelago resisted Spanish occupation for more than three centuries, but eventually succumbed to the influence of American occupation. The Spanish ceded the Philippines to the Americans for $20 million in 1898

2025 British docs to look out for in 2026

Abla Kandalaft — 2025-12-18T12:54:56Z

As we near the end of 2025, we wanted to flag a couple of placing working class communities at their heart, which will be screening in the new year.

First up is Iron Ladies, a rousing, inspiring doc championing the women at the heart of the miners' strikes that will resonate today.

Given where we are today, it's unsurprising that many people think back to the miners' strike of 1985 with a sense of resignation and defeat. Daniel Draper's doc Iron Ladies attempts (quite successfully) to shift that narrative. The film champions the spirit and tenacity of the women that sustained the fight for a whole year. "It were a win for women", one of the featured "Ladies" shares with Daniel. The strikes were triggered by Margaret Thatcher's government's pit closure plans, which were inevitably going to lead to mass unemployment and poverty, the effects of which are still being felt today.

Through (incredibly entertaining) talking heads, archive footage, and rousing music, Iron Ladies presents us with a global and in-depth appraisal of the strikes and their impact. Daniel speaks to women from the North to the South of the country - Durham, Yorkshire, South Wales, Kent... The film highlights the nationwide character of the strikes and their inspiring community spirit. It also delves into the sacrifices and hardship that the miners and their families had to endure. Crucially, the doc really drives home the remarkable fight that these women put up, in spite of the usual sexism they faced (“my mum told me I wasn't fit to be a wife or a mother”) and the wider pain and misery caused by the pit closures and police brutality. The doc doesn't shy away from revisiting the violence of episodes like the Battle of Oregraves and is scathing about media complicity and framing - "Police didn't clash with the miners. They attacked the miners". I'm mildly inclined to agree with The Indiependent's reviewer in that the film doesn't harness the opportunity to bring up the ways in which the events resonate in today's context. But... I would argue that audiences will invariably be thinking of the current UK political landscape: from the doctors' strikes to police repression and brutality, or the most recent starker echo: the first hunger strikes in the UK since 1981.

The second doc also champions working class voices, this time in the film industry. Rather, it unpacks the many ways in which they are actively and intentionally kept out of - at least - the higher echelons of film and TV. Again, through talking heads from industry stakeholders and famously vocal figures such as Maxine Peake and Paul Laverty, as well as concrete data, Scottish filmmaker Mark Forbes offers a fairly exhaustive account of the elitism that plagues this industry. This is a surprisingly rare doc about an issue that is so widely known and accepted. There's a distinct feeling that producers, funders, those with the keys to success all wax lyrical about theoretically platforming underrepresented voices but are not prepared to properly address the very material barriers that exist. Mark's film underlines the way exclusion really starts from birth. Access to the old boys' type networks is absolutely key - then followed over the years by successive hurdles: access to money, to cities and spaces where it all happens, ability to sustain high living costs and low pay or no pay... Let's hope industry "people" watch it and genuinely address the points it raises.

Here's an interview with Mark Forbes with The Canary:

Arab picks from LFF 2025

Abla Kandalaft, Alma — 2025-10-20T10:59:06Z

Aside from our recently reviewed Palestine 36, the BFI London Film Festival marked the festival run tailend for a number of films from the Arab world. Highlights include Erige Sehiri's Promised Sky, a rare, necessary, and beautifully dramatised account of migrant women from the Ivory Coast living in Tunisia, having made their way there for a variety of reasons (study, refuge...). Surprisingly few films have been made about intra-continental migration, despite this making up the vast majority of international migration patterns.

It doesn't make the women's plight any less harrowing. Erige Sehiri, who has a knack for filming female friendships, bonds and interactions with intimacy and heart (see Under the Fig Trees), tells the stories of Preacher Marie, young mother Naney and student Jolie who moved from their homeland in search of a better life. They end up looking after young Kenza, a 4 year-old girl washed ashore after losing her family in a perilous sea journey - a character heartbreakingly based on a real girl Erige met who did perish at sea with her mother. Sehiri's nuanced, moving depiction of motherhood - Naney missing her daughter and unable to be with her, Marie taking Kenza under her wing yet aware that the girl isn't hers - serves as a prism through which the hardship of the women's displacement is told. Yet, there are great moments of humour and joy showing the resilience of these women.

An utterly original, surreal and quite gripping pick is Khartoum, the result of five directors' efforts to piece together a heartfelt tribute to the Sudanese capital told throught the lives of five of its inhabitants. What started out as a UK backed small-scale project to create 5 short poems about Khartoum was entirely upended when the directors - one Brit and four Sudanese + the Khartoum residents they were filming were forced to flee following the outbreak of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in 2023. They used what production money they had left to flee to Kenya and, once there, all eventually rekindled to put together a different film. In the absence of footage and filming locations, they end up drawing on a variety of other funding bodies and opportunities to use greenscreen and animation to re-create scenes of everyday life in Khartoum. It's done in a similar vein to The Act of Killing and although some of the scenes they "perform" are heartbreaking, the end film is full of humour, joy, and colour. While director Rawya Al Haj is keen to stress the importance of raising political awareness about the conflict in Sudan and counter media misinformation - very much a proxy war as opposed to a civil war - Khartoum is a truly uplifting, rousing love letter to the both the city and its people.

Zain Duraie's Sink is a (criminally) rare film from the Arab world that tackles complex family dynamics and mental health. Duraie handles the subject with so much nuance, maturity and compassion that it came as a surprise to find out this was her first feature. Her first foray into filmmaking was in fact as Annemarie Jacir's assistant and there's something of that same treatment of intergenerational banter, of the intimacy of everyday interactions. The film tells the story of a mum (Clara Khoury, also starring in The Voice of Hind Rajab) dealing with the deterioriation of her son's mental health and the eventual fallout on her personal and professional lives and the rest of the family. Unsurprisingly, Duraie found it near impossible to garner interest on the part of the usual line up of European funders and co-productions given the subject matter. Eventually, other funding partners stepped in and the film saw the light of the day after five years in the making.

7 Activist documentaries available for free

Abla Kandalaft — 2025-10-16T16:33:34Z

The UCLA Film Archive just announced that 7 activist documentaries that are now freely available to access and stream for students, academics, and others. This update was shared through the Radical Film Network, thanks to Pr John T. Caldwell.

He writes: "This online collection is from a recent retrospective of my films that the UCLA Archive featured at the LA Hammer Museum last Fall. Now, all of these experimental documentaries and ethnographic films (made between 1983 and 2020) are available freely for classroom, area studies, or community use at the Film Archive's public Vimeo site."

These films primarily focus on immigration politics, migrant labour, indigenous organizing, and extractive economies in the U.S. and Central America.

The films deal with themese like ICE deportations, indegenous "migrant camps" and labour organising, as well as "reverse immigration” away from the “fortress America" U.S. of the late 1980s (“Freak Street: The Migratory Patterns of Hippies”, 1989); labor organizing by a local SoCal union community that broke the transnational corporate extraction economy of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto (“Boron Lockout”, 2012); the national economic erasure of indigenous practices and identities (the Managalase Communities of Papua New Guinea in “Kuije Kanan”, 1984); and, an unfortunate precursor to the current political theater and staged media “war” against Venezuelan “drug cartels" in 2025 (i.e., the Reagan-Contra war against the Sandinistas, that exploited the indigenous Afro-Caribbean Miskitu people from Nicaragua depicted in “Personas Desplazadas", 1983)."

The films from the Border Wars collection can be accessed here.

Palestine 36 - Harrowing and all too rare retelling of the pre-Nakba period

Mydylarama team — 2025-09-18T15:54:53Z

Palestinian cinema is distinctly prolific. The more efforts are made to erase Palestinians as a people and Palestine as a slice of West Asian land, the more urgent the storytelling becomes. 2025 has already seen a number of much hyped premieres and releases, but the novelty this year seems to be the rare inclusion of historical dramas, films set around the time of the Nakba or earlier. These have been few and far between on the mainstream festival/distribution circuit. The Time That Remains or The Gate of the Sun come to mind from the last couple of decades...

This year saw the Summer premiere of Palestinian American filmmaker's All That's Left of You, which she has described as a “Palestine origin story.” The film is built around a Jaffa family saga, covering post 48 decades (the Nakba, the war of 1967, the First Intifada) but the focus remains on the dynamics and the fate of one particular family.

Annemarie Jacir (Salt of this Sea, Wajib - a film that just gets better with every viewing) tackles the pre-Nakba peasant revolt of 1936 and the wider colonial context in ambitious and wide-reaching epic Palestine 36. The film begins in (the titular) 36 in Palestine, then under British administration following the end of WW1 and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Tensions have been escalating for years in the form of strikes, insurrections, and demonstrations, and culminate in an all-out Palestinian revolt against British colonial rule and the growing number of Zionist settlers.

In order to weave together quite dense geopolitical context and fictional plot, Jacir has quite deftly created a patchwork of characters - the young Yousef who hails from a small village, Afra and her family of farmers, Amir, an influential newspaper editor, and his journalist wife Khuloud, Father Boulos, the village priest, the British dignitaries - whose personal intertwined stories play out against the consequences of the factual history.

So little exists in mainstream cinema about this particular period - the Arab peasant revolt, the plan to partition Mandatory Palestine, which helps expose it (and the later the creation of the State of Israel) as "simply" another tendril of Britain's colonialist enterprises - that Jacir deserves credit for tackling it. Helpfully, the alludes to the earlier Sykes-Picot agreement, which essentially implemented the wider partition of the region and helps shed light on the geopolitics at play today, really driving home the fact that the ongoing wars, occupations, coups, and violence have their roots in political decisions that are only a century old.

Unsurprisingly, and despite weaving so many strands together (including archival footage), Annemarie Jacir does so seamlessly, and although the various protagonists are fairly archetypal, she creates real emotional engagement with their respective destinies, and rouses anger at the cruelty and injustice of the decades that would follow, and that would eventually lead us to what we are witnessing today.

The Fifth Annual Jerusalem Arab Film Festival (JAFF)

Mydylarama team — 2025-07-23T14:27:52Z

The Jerusalem Arab Film Festival has just celebrated its fifth edition. Set up in 2020, the festival is a rare chance to celebrate Arab storytelling in increasingly restricted cultural spaces under occupation and helps foster a sense of connection for Palestinians living in the city who are for the most part physically cut off from the rest of historic Palestine and the wider Arab world. The week-long JAFF presented 31 films, including fiction features, docs, and shorts, as well as panels and talks at Al Hakawati Theater in East Jerusalem.

Founder and director Nevin Shaheen is keen to stress the importance of this space for the city's cultural life and Palestinian identity: “We dedicate a significant part of the festival's program to social and political cinema, with a spotlight on the suffering of the people of Gaza, and we present films that reflect the stories of prisoners and the weight of memory under occupation. Cinema here becomes a space of emotional, political, and cultural resistance.” (Festival catalogue)

Internationally, Palestinian cinema stands out: despite the impossible situation on the ground, the incredible precariouness which defines all aspects of the lives of the quasi-totality of Palestinians, filmmaking is surprisingly prolific. Bethlehem-based Film Lab Palestine presents a full programme of new shorts every year, most notably showcased at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and without fail, the cinematography is exquisite, the stories are strong and rousing, the performances nuanced and captivating. Yet, Jerusalem has so far remained on the margins of this resilient sector. Festival consultant and Tripoli Film Festival founder Elias Khlat describes Jerusalem as "largely absent from the cinematic panorama”. “Had it not been for this film festival, initiated by Nevin Shaheen, it would have been entirely missing from the map.”

(EU Partners)

The festival opened on 9 July with Passing Dreams by prominent Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi (Feature Jury Prize), a family journey through Palestine on the hunt for a homing pigeon. Other entries include We Are Inside, by Farah Kassem (Shireen Abu Akleh Jury Prize); Diaries from Lebanon, by Myriam al-Hajj; The Vanishing, by Karim Moussaoui; Aicha, by Mahdi M. Al Barsaoui (Best Feature Film); The Brink of Dreams, by Ayman al-Amir (Best Doc); The Village Next to Paradise, by Mo Harawe; Madaniya, by Mohamed Subahi (Special Mention), A Passing Day, by Rasha Shahin (Best Short).

The festival was followed by a 2-day programme rescreening festival entries in Bethlehem in collaboration with Wonder Cabinet.