What’s an Oscar Worth?
It was costly for British actor Vanessa Redgrave beginning in the 1970s, pilloried for her crime of speaking out on an unspeakable subject. She refused to back down, calling her adversaries ‘Zionist hooligans’. Yes, really! Forty years later, resolute in the face of a tenacious enmity, she retorted “I had to do my bit”, at the age of 81, still blacklisted by the entertainment industry, still under attack.
In 1978, at the height of a distinguished career, Redgrave – a microphone in one hand, her Oscar in the other (for her role as the anti-Nazi crusader in Julia) – dared affirm her political principles while addressing the doggedly ‘apolitical’ Academy Awards audience.
And what had Redgrave dared to do? Advocate sovereignty and justice for Palestine. Standing alone before fellow film stars and international viewers 47 years ago was far more daring than it is today. Did she realize the high price she would pay? Banishment from the profession and decades of relentless scorn followed that moment of moral probity. The bilious attacks on her stemmed from Palestine a documentary she produced the year before, in 1977. (Even its showing in 2023 was met by violent threats.) It was about the PLO. Remember the PLO?
Today the blasphemous, unutterable word is ‘hamas’. As I expected, the outlawed term never crossed the lips of No Other Land’s happy Oscar holders at this year’s award ceremony. The Israeli director’s statement seemed well measured, considering the pitiful, helpless images of Gaza burned into the minds of tens of millions worldwide during the past 17 months. He called for parity between his people and the Palestinians, unfailingly adding an appeal for the release of Israeli hostages. As I recall, the words ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide’ were totally absent in his statement and in brief, shy remarks by his Palestinian partner.
The cost of this 2025 Oscar was surely paid (and continues to be extracted) in the saddest, most horrifying and highest human price – the massive number of martyred Gazans and uncounted wounded among the hundreds of thousands made homeless and starving. To this day.
Perhaps the award is a sorry acknowledgment of the Gazans’ sufferings and losses. Perhaps a substitute for the utter helplessness of millions of caring people worldwide marching in city-after-city in support of Palestinian rights and ending the genocide. Perhaps an alternate for failed legal actions to hold Israel accountable. Perhaps for the countless moral appeals that dissipated into a vacuum. Perhaps it is to compensate for earlier Palestine film nominees who never made the cut. (Like a life-achievement award to a veteran actor repeatedly passed over.)
No Other Land is not the first film to gain Oscar attention. In 2013 Five Broken Cameras was nominated in the same category. An Israeli production, it chronicled a Palestinian family’s thwarted attempts to film the willful destruction of their home. In 2001, yet another Israeli production, Promises, reached the Academy’s list of nominees. It featured 7 boys– 4 Jews, and 3 Palestinians – residing in Jerusalem and The West Bank. At that time, it may have seemed prescient, a ‘promise’ of peaceful co-existence. Long forgotten.
Significantly, like No Other Land, Promises and Five Broken Cameras, all depict Palestinian life – strained, tormented, or reflective; always fraught, forever uncertain – in the Occupied West Bank. Not Gaza. Not where hardships have always been so much more severe. (The Occupied West Bank had been conveniently accessible to outsiders, especially for an Israeli participant.)
Filmmaker Cherien Dabis, a rising figure in the industry, had hoped to break that pattern when she undertook production of All That’s Left of You inside Gaza. Dabis, the film’s Palestinian writer and director, began filming in Gaza in 2022. After the war erupted in October 2023, she was forced to shift production to Jordan and elsewhere, becoming a multi-national production. Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it stands above the others as an exclusive all-Palestinian work and features the well-known actors Maria Zreik, Mohammed Bakri and Ramzi Maqdisi. All That’s Left of You is an epic drama that traces the fortune of three generations of Palestinians beginning with the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.
That momentous calamity is the focus of Farha, another new and powerful production. Told through the eyes of a teenage girl, Farha is by Jordanian-based director Darin Salaam in collaboration with Watermelon Films. Watermelon Films also produced From Ground Zero, a collection of 22 short films assembled from war footage sent from inside Gaza. (If our 17 months of live feeds via TikTok and on television have not shown us the story.) Watermelon’s latest film, The Encampments, documents the student protests at Columbia…
Up to 30 years ago, most commentaries about Israel’s brutal occupation in Palestine were one-dimensional expositions from political scientists and an occasional journalist. (Among them Robert Fisk was an exception). They have now been eclipsed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by a generation of artists. Palestinian creative writers are in the forefront of interpreting for our distracted, distant world, the trauma and determination of compatriots in Occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Paralleling them are Palestinian-made films documenting their pasts and present. Currently showing in film festivals is A State of Passion and Where Olive Trees Weep.
A State of Passion, by director Carol Mansour and producer Muna Khalidi, follows a British Palestinian surgeon’s valiant efforts during ongoing Israeli bombardment. It stands alone as the only Gaza-based production. Where Olive Trees Weep records Palestinian journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish’s 2022 journey in the West Bank. Salt of This Sea by Annemarie Jacir and Bye Bye Tiberias 2023 by Lina Soualem are also directed by Palestinian women.
Film festivals in Toronto and Chicago are exclusively devoted to the Palestinian experience. Showcases like these serve to draw attention to the sometimes-overlooked contributions of Arab filmmakers – many Palestinian. 2025 marks the 29th year of AFMI, Arab Film and Media Institute in San Francisco, paralleling 25 years of Aflamuna in Beirut. A major US venue for Arab cinema talent, AFMI screens Arab films from across the globe. An established tradition in the Arab homelands, filmmaking in the diaspora is now flourishing. Early productions are less easy to find. But anyone who cares about Palestinian history can find work by veteran filmmakers Nazareth-born Elia Suleiman and the Lebanon-based team Mai Masri and Jean Chamoun whose first production was Under the Rubble (1983). The director of Omar and Rana’s Wedding is Palestinian-Dutch filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad . His Paradise Now was a 2006 Oscar nominee.
Repeated wars and upsets, inexorable hope, the arrival of new talent and the compulsion to not allow their rights and their struggle to die is affirmed in every one of these productions. Every personal story and recalled historical moment underlie the awful images of Gaza relentlessly piercing our consciousness.
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