Film

Dorgham Qreaiqea leads children's activities in a tent in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Dec. 12, 2024. (Courtesy of the Qreaiqea family)

Remembering an artist who gave life to the children of Gaza

Dorgham Qreaiqea led film, theater, and painting projects with an unshakeable belief in the power of art to transcend the war. An Israeli airstrike killed him.

By Loaay Wattad April 18, 2025

Screengrab from "Lyd." (Courtesy of the directors)

A Lyd without the Nakba

Merging documentary with sci-fi, a new film narrates the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian city in 1948, and imagines what it would look like if the war never happened. So the Israeli government banned it from being screened.

By Dikla Taylor-Sheinman October 25, 2024

Screening of ‘No Other Land’ in At-Tuwani, Masafer Yatta, occupied West Bank, March 14, 2024. (Oren Ziv)

In Masafer Yatta, our camera can be stronger than the bulldozer

At a screening in At-Tuwani, we realized our film isn’t just sharing our story with the world, but showing our people how we are fighting for change.

By Hamdan Ballal Al-Huraini March 29, 2024

Latest

A film is screened at Muristan Square in Jerusalem's Old City as part of the Jerusalem Film Festival, July 14, 2015. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Can Israeli documentary film survive as a haven for criticism of the occupation?

For years, left-wing filmmakers have resisted the right’s attempts at delegitimization. But political pressure may soon dry up their funding.

By Noam Sheizaf January 15, 2023

Barak Heymann. (Lorenzo Ferroni)

Why the Polish gov’t has this left-wing Israeli filmmaker in its crosshairs

What happens when a film challenges one of Poland's nationalist myths? Barak Heymann found out the hard way when his latest documentary questioned the number of Poles who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

By Libby Lenkinski July 27, 2022

Prisoners inside St. Joseph’s schoolyard during the Israeli army’s invasion and occupation of Sidon, in southern Lebanon, June 1982. (Alain Mingam/Gamma, courtesy of Nurit Kedar)

Confession without consequence

A film about a 1982 war crime in Lebanon shows Israeli soldiers are more open to divulging their violent actions. But their search for exoneration without accountability says much about Israeli society's moral decay.

By Seth Anziska July 26, 2022

A still from the film.

Looted from Beirut 35 years ago, now on display in Tel Aviv

‘Looted and Hidden’ digs through the archive of films taken by the Israeli army in 1982, and shines light on more property stolen by Israel: the history of Palestinian cinema. Rare images from the archive of Palestinian films and photographs, documenting decades of Palestinian history from before 1948 and after the Nakba, are finally seeing…

By Rami Younis December 4, 2017

Attendees line the red carpet at the Karama Gaza Film Festival in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City, May 13, 2015. (Photo by Dan Cohen)

Even in Gaza, you can’t have a film festival without a red carpet

The human rights film festival sends a message that Gaza is not just a strip of flattened homes, poverty and militants, as the media tends to portray it, says one of the organizers. ‘The people of Gaza are human beings, who love life, who seek peace, and who want to go to the movies, to…

By +972 Magazine May 14, 2015

Image from the Israeli film Policeman (© 2014 Corinth Films)

Film Review: ‘Policeman,’ a study of the Israeli alpha male

By leaving the Palestinian conflict in the background, filmmaker Lapid manages to skip over the common ‘shooting-and-crying’ formula, in which Israeli protagonists are portrayed more as victims than perpetrators of the conflict. The timing of the release of Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s debut, “Policeman,” was very unique in Israel: October 2011, right after that summer’s…

By Noam Sheizaf June 21, 2014

Jana Tamimi in the movie “Sometimes I’m Scared. Sometimes I Hit”

Film on Nabi Saleh’s kids competes for int’l awards

A new film ventures to allow Palestinian children to ‘describe a world full of violence and politics, of death and prisons, of conflicts and pain, a world created for them by the grownups. To let them explain this world to us, to describe it to us simply, with the clarity and naïveté that they still retain,…

By Activestills May 9, 2014

Abraham Lincoln (Photo: Mathew Brady)

From Lincoln Tunnel to Rabin Square: Legacies of bold leaders, and assassination

Perhaps the greatest similarity between Abraham Lincoln and Yitzhak Rabin is that both men’s assassins succeeded in altering history. Following Lincoln’s death the reconstruction of the American south was abandoned and the Supreme Court accepted the notion of ‘separate yet equal.’ Following Rabin’s assassination, the occupation of the West Bank and the Palestinian people has…

By +972 Magazine March 27, 2013

WATCH: Films explore human side of Sheikh Jarrah protest

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2u5MwVNPHo[/youtube] The affluent Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has become, in the words of one observer, the new battleground of the Israeli left. By now, most readers of +972 are familiar with the story of struggle and dispossession which has typified the Sheikh Jarrah protest movement. In early 2009, Jewish settlers, backed by American-funded organizations…

By Joseph Dana October 12, 2011