What Can an Oscar Mean for Palestinian Stories?
Cinema that takes on the life and times of Palestinians has rarely been celebrated in the West. Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), both by the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, were Oscar nominees for best foreign film, and Paradise Now won a Golden Globe in 2006. Last year, No Other Land (2024)—a brutal, indispensable record of the erasure of Masafer Yatta—took home best documentary at the Academy Awards. “It’s difficult to review No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist film-makers on the destruction of villages in the West Bank, on a formal level,” The Guardian’s reviewer Adrian Horton remarked. “The usual rubric for evaluating non-fiction cinema does not really extend to films whose existence was actively challenged throughout filming, whose makers’ equipment and livelihood were constantly at risk.”
Despite the unfavorable conditions under which the film was made, the filmmaking is deft and persuasive verité, mixed with just enough tonal levity and thoughtfully juxtaposed archival to give you a sense of the difficulty of making any sort of life for oneself as your community and those nearby are terrorized and dismantled by state-sanctioned settlers. It took home the Oscar despite not receiving a single distribution offer from a studio, streamer, or mini-major.
This year’s international feature category became a battlefield of sorts around what narratives the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is winning to amplify and which ghosts it is unwilling to unearth, as three very different movies about the plight of the Palestinians vied for a spot among the nominees for the first time: Palestinian entry Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, Jordanian entry Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, and Tunisian entry and eventual best foreign film nominee Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. The major distributors refused to touch these films, just as they passed on No Other Land. Yet, on the festival circuit and in their small weeklong runs in L.A. or New York, this trio stood out in an American media environment that has often shunned or silenced Palestinian voices. These films do not just ask for empathy; they each demand an accounting, both for the past and the present.
No wonder then that a screening in Jerusalem of Jacir’s Palestine 36 in January was shut down by the city’s police, with Israeli Minister of National Security Avshalom Peled placing a citywide ban on the movie, which was partially filmed there. Widely programmed on the fall festival circuit since a world premiere at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, the movie is a sweeping historical reconstruction of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt against the British Mandate. There is a desperate, almost miraculous tenacity to its very existence; the shoot was to commence in 2023 in the West Bank but moved to Jordan as the geopolitical landscape succumbed to total conflagration, only to return to Palestinian soil in late 2024 after multiple interruptions. It stands now as a singular artifact—the only feature to physically navigate the psychic and material upheavals of the first two years of this ongoing catastrophe.
The resulting film plays like a corrective to the grand colonial myths of Lawrence of Arabia–style British adventuring and benevolence. Its narrative is anchored by Yousef (Karim Daoud Anaya), a farmer who works in Jerusalem by day and returns to the hills of nearby Al Basma at night. The opening scenes bluntly announce the film’s thesis: At a Mediterranean port, Arab stevedores unload barrels; one, destined for a Jewish importer, splits open like a piñata to reveal rifles. Simultaneously, the British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope (played with velvety hauteur by Jeremy Irons) inaugurates the BBC-like Palestinian Broadcasting Service from a transmitter in Ramallah, murmuring about harmony as Arab and Jewish dignitaries look on. (The station, we are reminded, preferred light Western songs and orientalized discussions of Arab culture to politics.) The juxtaposition is unsubtle: Beneath the civilities, there are guns.
Within days, a general strike and tax boycott convulse the country, aimed at halting Jewish settlers who, in the film, erect stockades on property lacking Ottoman-era title. In the first act, they begin to make their presence felt along the margins of the narrative, a nameless other depicted not unlike Native Americans in an early John Ford picture about how the West Was Won. Jacir crosscuts between Jerusalem—where Palestinian men debate how best to respond—and Al Basma, where Yousef’s family has long lived and where a series of radicalizing events takes place. His father is killed by settlers and his younger brother detained by them, for no particular reason.
Yousef, when not on his farm, is a driver in the city for a well-heeled columnist, Amir, played by Tunisian actor Dhafer L’Abadine. His well-appointed dwelling and increasingly conciliatory attitude in the geopolitical chessboard of Jerusalem contrast throughout the film with the modest dwellings of Yousef’s family and the village that they help support. Perhaps the story’s most tragic figure, Amir thinks his wealth will ultimately protect him from what’s coming, along with the payments he has been accepting on the side from a settler organization.
The movie’s version of history is not without its elisions. When the British government releases the Peel Commission report—proposing the partition of Mandatory Palestine into a small Jewish state, a larger Arab state, and a neutral Jerusalem—the dinner guests in Amir’s salon dissolve into tears and gunfire punctures the night. Soon after, there is a set piece in which villagers, bearing no discernible ill will, stray near the timber palisade of a Jewish encampment; a guard in a watchtower fires, and a man falls. The settlers are filmed as silhouettes behind slats, voiceless and distant—an abstraction of menace rather than a community with its own fears and factions.
The revolt in Jacir’s telling seems to materialize fully formed after episodes like these. Omitted is the slow build toward all-out fighting: the tit-for-tat ambush of a bus by Arab underground members, killing two Jews, and the retaliatory murders of two Arab laborers by members of the Irgun, the Jewish paramilitaries. Violence, which had long flickered intermittently between the parties, has a hazy single ignition point in this version of history. Still Jacir’s fictional film, which features beautifully restored archival of Mandatory Palestine, delivers the outlines of that critical moment in the region’s history with an emotional wallop and presents a meticulous portrayal of the experience of dispossession.
Cherien Dabis’s remarkable All That’s Left of You, Jordan’s submission for this year’s Oscars, is perhaps the most structurally ambitious and aesthetically assured of the three films. It tells a story that spans generations, from the Nakba to the first intifada. Spanning seven decades, it is a multigenerational tapestry that traces the psychic scars of a single family through the upheavals of 1948, 1978, and 1988. The film initially centers on a teenager named Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) in the late 1980s, whose experience of a moment of casual violence in the occupied West Bank propels us into the story of his family across the preceding decades.
His mother, Hanan (played by Dabis herself with a weary, translucent grace), begins to recount a history of dispossession. We see the family’s flight from Jaffa in 1948—like Amir’s family in the Jacir film, they are well-to-do, with a gorgeous family compound that will belong to settlers in the city soon to be rebranded as Tel Aviv—as a sensory trauma that exists in the present tense of her delicate, often elegantly composed tableaux.
The dialogue can be flabbily expository at times and, at over two hours, the movie is, like so much contemporary cinema, longer than it probably needs to be. That’s largely thanks to the remarkable faces Dabis has assembled; she and Saleh Bakri, as her despondent husband, Salim, give fabulous performances as their characters cope with the aftermath of Noor’s encounter with an Israeli bullet while attending a protest, and the heartrending choice they ultimately have to make in its wake.
As the sweep of events moves on to 1988 and beyond, the movie uses the changing value and ultimate loss of their family home as a way to explore a series of relationships riven by systematic displacement. In the film’s capstone section, the couple, now octogenarians, visit Salim’s former home, in what is now called Tel Aviv, for the first time. It has been nearly 70 years since he fled and his father was dragged off their land. In a sequence in which they walk around like ghosts, eating at cafés and walking amid Tel Aviv’s dynamic, cosmopolitan charms, neither can escape the haunting sense of loss as they try to come to grips with a society built on the ruins of their own.
Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab is the only one of the three Palestinian movies to have garnered an Oscar nomination this year. An austere chamber piece, Ben Hania’s film stays in the cramped, desperate offices of the Red Crescent dispatchers who are trying to navigate an IDF-enforced “permission” system to get aid to the wounded—a system designed to fail. It revolves around a 70-minute call from a 6-year-old girl named Hind Rajab, whose pleas for help from a car riddled with bullets in Gaza in 2024 became the defining audio of the genocide; the Kia Picanto she was trapped in was shot at least 335 times by the Israel Defense Forces. The docudrama reconstructs the final hours of her life from the perspective of the helpless individuals who kept her company and hoped to save her life.
Ben Hania uses the actual audio recording of Hind’s call to the Red Crescent with performers playing the staffers (Amer Hlehel and Clara Khoury) who attempted to save her. It is a harrowing, claustrophobic experience and a hauntingly effective choice, imbuing an emotional intensity it might not otherwise have. The waveform of Hind’s actual voice—small, terrified, asking not to be left alone in the dark—shimmers on the screen, a digital ghost that no amount of diplomatic “concern” can exorcise.
The movie mines the psyches of the first responders and their increasing rage about all the road blocks, literal and metaphorical, that stand in the way of helping. (Attempts to rescue Hind also led to the deaths of the ambulance drivers who tried to reach her.) The movie is a quiet indictment of the failure of systems, be they humanitarian, political, or moral, to protect the most vulnerable of us. It is a confrontation with the reality of what the world allowed to happen to a child, while NGOs, ambassadors, foreign ministers, and the entertainment industry were debating the wording of their press releases.
It was in this spirit that Ben Hania refused to accept the “most valuable film” award at the annual Cinema for Peace gala in Berlin during last month’s 76th Berlinale, which was riven from the start with debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Germany’s complicity with the ongoing genocide. “Peace,” she said, “is not a perfume sprayed over violence.” A prize, she suggested, cannot launder the conditions that make such films necessary in the first place. Her indictment was unsparing. The Israeli army, she argued, killed Hind Rajab and her family, “with the complicity of the world’s most powerful governments and institutions,” including that of the German government, which directly supports the Berlinale. In that context, gratitude felt obscene. “I feel responsibility more than gratitude,” she told those gathered, among them former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Hind Rajab is not the front-runner in the race for best international feature film at the Academy Awards. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, also nominated for best picture and best director, is the overwhelming favorite, with Neon’s Palme D’or–winning It Was Just an Accident from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi as its chief rival. Hind Rajab does, however, have serious backing. The film’s emergence as a contender was helped by Hollywood heavyweights who joined the project as executive producers following its Venice premiere: Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Brad Pitt, and Jonathan Glazer, who famously used his acceptance speech for 2023 best foreign film Oscar for The Zone of Interest to refute “his Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an Occupation which has led to conflict for so many people.”
An Academy Award nomination is a limited thing: It cannot change policy. The genocide continues apace, with hundreds of Gazans killed in shooting and bombings since the latest “ceasefire” went into effect late last year. But if it invites a wider audience to take this history and present more seriously, then the nomination of The Voice of Hind Rajab will have done more good than the majority of nominations ever do.
Still, such breakthroughs feel increasingly hollow and illusory. Despite the win for No Other Land last year, Hollywood major streamers, who used to brag about their “diversity initiatives,” have continued to treat it like radioactive material. More galling is the cost paid by those who made it. Its co-director Handan Ballal was attacked by a group of Israeli settlers and arrested shortly after he returned from his Oscar win to the West Bank. This February, he and his family were assaulted again, leaving his brother severely injured.
That’s not as bad as what happened to Awdah Hathaleen, however—a collaborator and activist who helped film the documentary and who was murdered this past July. He wasn’t killed in the “crossfire” or an “accident.” He was shot in the chest by an Israeli settler, Yinon Levi—a man who had faced sanctions from the U.S. during the Biden administration, only to have those sanctions lifted when Trump took office. Awdah’s death and the continued abuse of Ballal’s family is a reminder that in the West Bank, the “Oscar-winning” sheen provides no shield.