What Cinema Made Possible: Charting Palestinian Film From Exile to the Mainstream

Your book examines cinematic production and activism in the United States as it has helped move Palestinian liberation politics from the periphery towards the mainstream, starting in the 1970s and into the present day. What drove you to conduct this research and how long did it take? What material or archives were central to your project?

The seeds of this project lie in my own childhood experiences of growing up Palestinian-American in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1980s and 1990s. Cambridge, and the Boston area more broadly, is a place where the dominant culture conceives of itself as liberal and progressive, often celebrating itself as multicultural and anti-racist despite pervasive racism and prejudice directed at various racialized groups.

I experienced this in my childhood in two particular ways. First, by being the target of Zionist bullying by my peers (and even by some of their parents) and by teachers and school administrators who either contributed to the ostracism or ignored the situation altogether. The second way I experienced it was by witnessing Black students and other students of color face racism.

At the same time, those students of color did not perceive me as being one of them, and it was deeply ingrained in them that “Palestinian” somehow also meant “antisemitic” or “terrorist.” It is this latter point that is indicative of how the culture of the Boston area during that period is exemplary of what I refer to in the book as “compulsory Zionism,” so much so that children performed the work of policing Palestinian speech and enforcing Zionism as the norm.

Seeing that my experience of growing up in Cambridge was deeply marked by a sense of misunderstanding and isolation, I was surprised to learn that a Palestine Film Festival was starting up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2006. I asked myself: how could a region like the Boston area, with its deeply entrenched Zionist culture, host a Palestine film fest in one of the region's most elite cultural institutions?

Ultimately, that is how and why I came to focus on Palestine-themed film festivals for my dissertation, which was the foundation of this book. I began to research a series of controversies over attempts to censor Palestinian cinema and Palestine solidarity cinema in various arts and media institutions in the Boston area, as well as nationally, in the 1980s and 1990s.

This history made it all the more fascinating to me that a city like Boston, with such an overt history of attempts to censor Palestinian cinema, would then become host to one of the most well-attended and long-standing Palestine-themed film festivals in the United States. Boston essentially became a case study for understanding Zionist cultural hegemony and how Palestinian and Arab American activists and allies leveraged cinema in order to resist that hegemony and produce a counterpublic discourse on Palestine. A key part of the book is its examination of how the discourse on Palestine changed over the course of several decades within the context of Hollywood award shows like the Oscars and Golden Globes.

From its origins as my dissertation project in 2013 to the completion of the final draft in 2024, this book took over a decade to complete.

Your book is a history of cinematic activism, but it’s also inevitably a history of grief, resistance, and memory. How has your relationship to the subject matter evolved throughout the years, and in light of the genocide in Gaza?

In the preface to “Mainstreaming Palestine,” I opened up about the isolation I felt as a queer, gender non-conforming, Palestinian-American youth growing up in Cambridge. And in that preface, I mention that one way I coped with that isolation was by voraciously consuming independent and international films rented out from a local video rental store. That’s how I spent most weekends of my teen years.

That was also how I coped with the grief I felt growing up, though at the time I did not understand that what I was feeling was grief. Aside from Eila Suleiman’s films, there weren’t many Palestinian films available at that store in Cambridge. But it was in the work of filmmakers like Zhang Yimou, Majid Majidi, Samira Makhmalbaf, Agnieska Holland, Mathieu Kassovitz, Alfonso Cuarón, and Pedro Almodovar, and queer U.S. independent filmmakers like Jamie Babbit, Jennie Livingston, and Cheryl Dunye that I felt the human condition most beautifully reflected back to me in a way that gave me hope for something — anything! —  beyond the violence, mundane and spectacular, of U.S. culture.

A question I have found myself frequently asking, rhetorically and to no one in particular, is: What is cinema after genocide? Is it a document? Is it collective memory? Is it an imagined community? Is it therapeutic or cathartic? Is it necessary? Is it crass? I don’t really have an answer to that question.

And yet, I keep watching films. And I keep hosting screenings and moderating Q&A sessions. And perhaps most importantly, I keep teaching my Palestinian cinema class. There are days when I really do not want to face the music, especially in the classroom. The circumstances for those of us in the U.S. academy who teach about Palestine are extremely tense and precarious right now. But that struggle does not compare to the struggle to survive the violence of the Zionist entity.

What is cinema after genocide? Is it a document? Is it collective memory? Is it an imagined community? Is it therapeutic or cathartic? Is it necessary? Is it crass?

I have never really identified as an activist, but I do strongly identify as an educator. And that is my contribution to the cause: teaching Palestine. Introducing students to Palestinian cinema has been, in my experience, one of the more successful ways to usher them into a conversation about Palestine, a conversation they have been primed to resist, simply because of the culture of compulsory Zionism in the U.S.

That is the overall argument of my book: exhibiting Palestinian cinema and cinematic activism for Palestine have been unusually successful methods of advocacy in the U.S. In other words, cinematic activism for Palestine has itself constituted an exception to the “Palestine exception” to free speech and has succeeded in resisting the enforcement of compulsory Zionism.

You describe a shift in Palestinian cinema occurring in the 1980s, primarily from documentary and experimental films characterized by revolutionary politics and a commitment to the anti-colonial principles of Third Cinema toward more conventional narrative cinema. Could you describe this part of your project to our readers in some detail and map it out in relation to the changing political conditions of Oslo and economic conditions of Palestinian cinematic production?

There are two realms through which this shift takes place: within the Palestinian cinematic movement itself, and within the reception of Palestinian cinema. These two realms must be located within the global political economy of cinema.

The Palestinian cinematic movement has been historicized by Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi according to four periods. Those periods are: the Beginning (1935 to 1948); the Epoch of Silence (1948 to 1967); Cinema in Exile (1968 to 1982), which is also referred to by Nadia Yaqub as the Revolutionary Period; and the Return Home (1980 to present).

The Revolutionary Period marks a moment during which the production and circulation of documentary and experimental films by Palestinian filmmakers and allies was adopted as part of the official public relations strategy for the various factions of the Palestinian liberation movement. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a confederated umbrella group consisting of various parties within it, such as Fatah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), established film units in the service of documenting the Palestinian revolution, recuperating the Palestinian image, and communicating the Palestinian liberation movement’s goals to wider audiences through cinema. The overwhelming majority of these films consisted of documentaries, formal and experimental alike, informed by the ideology and aesthetics of Third Cinema. For those interested in reading more about this, I highly recommend Nadia Yaqub’s book “Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution” and Khadijeh Habashneh’s “Knights of Cinema.”

Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi is an interesting figure whose work in many ways constitutes a bridge between the Revolutionary Period and the Fourth Period/Return Home. For example, Khleifi’s “Fertile Memory” (1981) is a hybrid film that incorporates elements of both documentary and narrative film. This was also the first film to be shot by a Palestinian director within Israeli borders. It is a pivotal film within Palestinian cinematic history not only for its genre-bending blend of documentary and narrative, but also for its intimate focus on the experiences and opinions of two Palestinian women as they navigate various social and political demands and suppressions, both from the Israeli occupation and from within Palestinian society itself. “Fertile Memory” marks the beginnings of a pivot away from documentary and into the realm of narrative film within Palestinian cinema.

Khleifi’s second film, “Wedding in Galilee” (1987), is the narrative film that put Palestinian cinema on the map as national cinema. While Palestinian films and Palestine solidarity films had previously circulated in film festivals worldwide, “Wedding in Galilee” garnered a lot of attention and was exhibited at elite film festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the International Critics Prize.

The recognition of Palestinian cinema as national cinema has been central to advancing the discourse on Palestinian liberation. In turn, the content of much of Palestinian narrative film from the early part of this period also makes clear that this is a body of cinema produced under, and representing the conditions of, exile and occupation. As such, the inclusion of Palestinian cinema as national cinema within the global political economy of cinema is strategic in asserting Palestinian rights to self-determination.

That said, Palestinian cinema, whether from the Revolutionary Period or the Fourth Period, has always had an uneasy relationship to the category of national cinema. The films produced during the Revolutionary Period were made entirely in exile. And while done so under the auspices of the PLO, film crews were often multi-national, meaning that Palestinian cinema from this period was made up of many different kinds of people, not all of whom were Palestinian. Fourth Period films also have a complicated relationship to national cinema because they are sometimes produced as Israeli films or, more commonly, are co-productions with other nations such as Belgium, France, Germany, Jordan, Morocco, the Netherlands, and others.

The inclusion of Palestinian cinema as national cinema within the global political economy of cinema is strategic in asserting Palestinian rights to self-determination.

But what is different about the films of the Fourth Period is that there has been a distinct shift toward auteurism, meaning that a number of filmmakers have established themselves internationally as the auteurs of Palestinian cinema, regardless of their films’ production or co-production status. One way in which this has played out has been through the controversies outlined in chapter four of “Mainstreaming Palestine,” wherein filmmakers succeeded in lobbying for their films to be listed as and referred to as “Palestinian” when nominated for prestigious Hollywood awards, the ceremonies for which are broadcast to dozens of millions of television audiences worldwide.

What tools of media production and distribution are most prominent in your book? Do you draw any practical and political implications for their use today? 

I feel strongly that the distribution aspect of cinematic activism is a key factor in the production and circulation of Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics in the U.S. in particular. In the book, I used the concept of “distribution” differently than how it is taken up in cinema studies. “Distribution” is less about formal, top-down, and corporate modes of film circulation. Rather, it serves as a concept through which to understand how Palestinian films and Palestine solidarity films circulate on a grassroots level, find audiences, and communicate messages about Palestine. 

In the book, I note that within the specific context of the “Palestine exception” to free speech within the United States, cinema has been a way of subverting that exception. This has to do, in part, with the unique history of censorship in Hollywood during the McCarthy era, during which the practice of blacklisting professionals due to left-wing political beliefs proliferated. It is a particularly unsavory moment in Hollywood history that is associated with a lot of shame. In the wake of that history, attempts at censorship within the arena of cinema have been met with staunch resistance. For example, in 2021 the streaming service Netflix came under attack from Zionist organizations for releasing Darin Sallam’s historical drama, “Farha” (2021), a narrative film which takes the Nakba as its primary subject matter. Zionist efforts to have the film removed from the platform ultimately failed. In another example, in the aftermath of October 7th, the Hunter College administration’s attempt to prevent a screening of the solidarity film “Israelism” was ultimately thwarted and the screening was indeed allowed to go on. What links these examples together is not the content of their films. One is a historical drama (“Farha”) and an example of Palestinian cinema, and the other is adocumentary (“Israelism”) and an example of Palestine solidarity cinema. What links these films together, though, is the fact that they were both attacked at the level of distribution with attempts to prevent their exhibition, whether on a streaming platform or on a college campus. And in both cases, the attempts to prevent their distribution failed.  

You open your introduction to “Mainstreaming Palestine” with Jonathan Glazer’s Academy Awards acceptance speech, in which he condemned the dehumanization of victims, both on October 7 and in Gaza, to great applause and celebration. More recently, we saw the 21-minute standing ovation at Venice Film Festival for the film “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” as well as its winning of the Grand Jury Prize. How do these two episodes of film-industry celebration for humanitarian stances on Palestine fit in the historic trajectories you map out?

I feel complicated about this. On the one hand, I am grateful for people using such highly visible platforms to advocate for Palestine. On the other hand, there is a reason that the subtitle of my book’s introduction is “Beware the Palestine Solidarity Culture Industry.”

Personally, I feel that the Glazer moment at the Oscars and the Venice Film Festival moment are qualitatively quite different. Glazer utilized the soapbox of the Academy Awards to call out the Israeli state’s “hijacking” (his word) of the Jewish faith and the memory of the Holocaust as justification for the mass slaughter of civilians. He took his five minutes of fame to ask twenty million viewers watching that broadcast: “How do we resist?” To me, that was not simply a rhetorical question, as he then pointed to the mundane, real-life acts of resistance performed by one of the characters in the film. Glazer was quite literally saying to the audience, “Resist. Here’s how.”

Cinema has always been a way of subverting the “Palestine exception” to free speech within the United States.

The Venice Film Festival standing ovation makes me feel uneasy. What does a 21-minute standing ovation do for Palestinian suffering? One of the central aspects of cinematic activism that I discuss in the book is that it is not simply enough to make and watch films, but that it is in circulating those films that additional measures can and should be taken. After the Oscars, Glazer donated signed ephemera from his film to the Cinema for Gaza online auction, a fundraising campaign for the British charity organization Medical Aid for Palestinians that ended up raising $315,000 to send medical aid to Gaza. In the book, I refer to this kind of mobilization of spectators in the service of fundraising as “philanthro-spectatorship.” Put another way: mobilizing your spectators toward certain actions, such as humanitarian fundraising, is very different from standing around clapping.

That said, I have no doubt that those who participated in that 21-minute standing ovation are some tremendously powerful people in the film industry, and that the experience of watching that film and participating in that standing ovation was tremendously emotional. And emotion is a key aspect of mobilizing everyday people into action. The one thing that gives me hope about the Venice film festival moment is that it has the potential to galvanize powerful players within the global film industry into supporting the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Notably, the executive producers of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Hollywood actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, signed the Film Workers for Palestine pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions.

In the past month, we saw a pledge drawn up by Film Workers for Palestine being signed by several notable mainstream and Hollywood cinema stars, such as Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Mark Ruffalo. How do you locate this normalization of boycott within the film industry in relation to the historical episodes in your book? Would you say that it is a novel development?

Film Workers for Palestine is very upfront that they are operating in the tradition of Filmmakers United Against Apartheid, which was a boycott campaign against the apartheid government in South Africa. The apartheid regime in South Africa was not dismantled because people asked nicely. That regime fell under the weight of economic pressure leveraged through a combination of consumer and academic boycotts, institutional divestment (including prominent U.S. academic institutions pulling their endowment investments linked to South Africa), and international sanctions. In this sense, the Film Workers for Palestine campaign is not novel.

What is new, I think, is that there is now a critical mass of workers in solidarity with Palestine in the film industry. For a long time, Hollywood has been transparent about its support for Israel and Zionism. When Vanessa Redgrave spoke up for Palestine in the 1970s, she was essentially blacklisted. But things have significantly changed, politically and economically, since the 1970s.

The studio system no longer reigns supreme in Hollywood and independent production companies are now some of the most important institutions in Hollywood. Streaming services, and their subscription and advertising revenue, have changed the way films are released and circulated and how the industry gains profit. And perhaps more importantly, film workers and the general public’s tolerance for systemic racism and sexism in Hollywood is at an all-time low. Film workers of color have leveraged social media and online activism to call for boycotts of Hollywood award shows in particular as a way to hit the industry where it hurts: in its viewership. Low viewership of things like Hollywood award shows communicate to the industry that it is losing its audience: smaller audiences, smaller profits.

So that is all to say: the discourse on Palestine in Hollywood is two-fold. There are those who are serious about organizing a boycott campaign of the Israeli film industry as a way to dismantle the Israeli apartheid regime. If necessary, that boycott can be turned toward Hollywood itself. And then there are those who are simply performing solidarity as a way to deflect criticism and protect the bottom line. Even worse, there are those who seek to capitalize on a newfound market of would-be spectators who are uninformed about yet sympathetic to Palestine. It is the attention and subscriptions of these would-be spectators who players in the entertainment industry are jockeying for, not in the service of cinematic activism, but in the service of financial gain. Which is why it is so important for the BDS movement to mobilize spectators and, if necessary, turn them into what I refer to in the book as “anti-spectators.”