[rewrite this title Cinema after the Flood of Al -Aqsa .. A wave of films that monitor the Palestinian tragedy art ]

The Palestinian issue appears in cinematic films in various forms. Sometimes it is as a background of events, and at other times a major event. However, the situation has changed after the Flood of Al -Aqsa, as there were various films in the international festivals that highlight this issue.

We focus here on very recent films, shown after the Flood of Al -Aqsa, some of which focus on the events of Gaza specifically, such as “from zero distance”, while others show different aspects of the difficulties that the Palestinians are forced to deal with only daily to survive.

The film is a guerrilla work

Since the Nakba, the Israeli occupation seeks to erase the Palestinian identity and heritage in all ways. One of these methods is to destroy the Palestinian archive. In 1965, the Palestine Research Center (PRC) was established in Beirut with the aim of preserving the cultural archive of the history of Palestine and its political struggle. Seventeen years later, the Israeli forces launched an attack on this archive and seized this cultural heritage.

On the other hand, we have Palestinian director Kamal Al -Jaafari, mainly concerned with maintaining this archive and using it as a weapon against these attacks. In his previous movie “Restore” (2015), he collected materials from Israeli films that filmed the city of Jaffa in the sixties, seventies and eighties, where the Palestinians appear in the background in transit, then used cinematic techniques, so the Israeli actors were erased from the middle of the pictures, and returned the Palestinians to the lead after they were trapped by the margin.

Kamal Al -Jaafari uses the archive magic again to create a different cinematic story in his movie “The Film Work”, which is based on shots over the course of many years, and reassemble it again to show the brutal image in which the occupation was torn as Palestine.

“The film was shown as a guerrilla work in several international festivals during 2024, and he received various prizes, including the jury award from the” VISIONS du R. “éel) is an international documentary festival, founded in 1969 in the city of Neon, Switzerland.

Orange from Jaffa

“Orange from Jaffa”, directed by Mohamed Al -Mughni, focuses on the difficulties of the daily life of a Palestinian who cannot move in his country freely. The Palestinian young man (Samer Bisharat) only wants to cross from one region to another, but he needs to pass from an Israeli security gathering, which means refusing to pass it by 99%, but rather exposes his life and the life of those who take him to a imminent danger.

However, his extreme need to pass it to make him running, and asks a taxi driver to take him on a trip. Farouk (Kamel Al -Basha) thinks that the young man holds a traffic permit, and does not discover the absence of this statement until it is too late, to become with Muhammad at the mercy of the Israeli soldier who is under pressure from his mother for his work on Saturday, which is religiously hated from her point of view.

The film presents its story in less than half an hour, which led to the intensification of events, as well as the conflicting feelings of both the two main characters. And filming most of the scenes inside the car brought to the spectator the feeling of distress on the prisoner in a limited environment, despite the expansion of the world outside this prison. The car becomes metaphor for the Palestinian prison in their country.

Palestine dancer

“Dancer Palestine” is a documentary that deals with another erasure process for the Palestinian heritage, and this time for the Palestinian Dabke dance. The film begins with a search process on the Internet about this dance, to show the absence of content in some sites concerned with heritage, and its weakness in other sites, which shows the systematic erasure process for this dance and its dependency on the Palestinian heritage, as happened before with Palestinian food attributed to Israel.

The film presents a parallel narration of the Dabkeh story. The first narration line is the Dabkeh and its history, and how it has been associated with Palestinian history by the Nakba until now, while the other line focuses on the experience of a group of Palestinian youth now learning and teaching the Dabkeh dance, to ensure its continuation even under the painful circumstances that the Palestinian people live.

As the movie “The Film” explained a guerrilla “work” before, the archive, whether by documents, oral or artistic, is a way to preserve the Palestinian presence in light of the erasure and ethnic cleansing process to the Palestinians at the present time.

From zero distance

“From the distance zero” is a cinematic project that documents the conditions of the Palestinians after October 20, 2023, by a group of Palestinian outputs and directors. This project launched the Palestinian director Rashid Mashrawi, with the aim of providing a platform for young artists and artists to express themselves and the pain, calamities and loss they live through.

The “zero distance” consists of 22 short films, each of which ranges from 3 to 6 minutes, and provides a painful view painfully on the current reality in Gaza. Where the project reflects the various experiences of people’s daily lives, including the challenges, tragedies and moments of steadfastness.

The films vary between documentary, novel, animation, and even experimental cinema, with a rich diversity of stories that reflect sadness, joy and hope inherent in the lives of every citizen in Gaza. Despite the harsh circumstances of photography, the artistic experience presented by the film is necessary to understand the forms of coexistence that Gaza residents are forced daily, providing an intimate and strong image of daily life and the suffering of the Palestinian people.

“No other land”

“No Land” is the movie that won the Oscar, the best documentary for this year, documented by the young director Basil Adra, the expulsion and destruction of the people of the small mountainous villages, traveling to Yatta in the southern West Bank. The operation that has been taking place since his childhood by grabbing parts of this land year after year. The film reviews his early memories as a child and Israeli soldiers stormed his home, arrest his Palestinian activist, and the ongoing attacks by settlers.

Basil has been documented over the years for forced removal, bulldozers that destroy homes, and permanent violence. The events of the film occurred before 2023, but the screening of the film after the events of the Flood of Al -Aqsa has shed light on the ongoing and daily attacks on the Palestinians, which make their lives on their lands impossible, even away from what is now going on in Palestine.

“No other land” is a joint production between Palestine and Norway, directed by the Quartet Basil Adra, Hamdan Bilal, Young Ibrahim, and Rahil Tsour, and they are Palestinian and Israeli activists supporting the Palestinian cause, and was shown in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival.