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প্যালেস্তাইনের সিনেমাঃ উৎসের সন্ধানেSounak Sarkar |
Even in Gaza, under the suffocating blockade, young filmmakers use digital tools to produce short films and documentaries that travel globally. |
“I want to take a moment and talk about something that is bigger, something disastrous that is happening in Palestine. Every child deserves peace, freedom and liberation and Palestine is no exception. This is a responsibility to think for a moment… I might upset my country but it doesn’t matter to me anymore.” Anuparna Roy said a few days ago, at the stage of Venice Film Festival 2025, while receiving the award for the best director for her film named ‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’. In the long history of people’s struggles, culture has always been a site of resistance. Songs, theatre, painting, and cinema become weapons against oppression, because they assert the humanity of those whom imperialism seeks to silence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Palestinian cinema. For a people systematically dispossessed of land, rights, and even recognition, the moving image has served as a counter-archive, a people’s history in frames. The beginnings of cinema in Palestine during the 1930s were fragile yet meaningful. Early reels documented the landscape, lives, and political mobilisations before the Nakba of 1948. The catastrophe, in which over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled and more than 400 villages destroyed and it marked the decisive break that shaped all cultural expression. Dispossession and exile forced Palestinians to rebuild their cultural and political institutions in refugee camps and in solidarity with other anti-colonial struggles across the Arab world. It was in this crucible that militant cinema emerged. The Palestinian Cinema Unit, formed under the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968, treated cinema as a revolutionary tool. Films like They Do Not Exist (1974) by Mustafa Abu Ali or With Soul, With Blood (1971) by Hani Jawhariyyeh were not simply artistic works but part of the resistance apparatus and exposing Israeli crimes, celebrating martyrs, and rallying international solidarity. This was cinema as praxis: revolutionary aesthetics wedded to the struggle for liberation. Here, we see the convergence of art and politics that Marxists have long emphasised. Cultural production under colonial occupation cannot be “neutral”; it is inevitably part of class and national struggle. The militant film units understood this: they rejected Western notions of cinema as a commodity and embraced it as collective political pedagogy. Screenings were often clandestine, taking place in refugee camps or solidarity festivals, functioning as spaces of consciousness-building. Imperialism, however, struck back. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, backed by U.S. power, not only massacred civilians in Sabra and Shatila but also looted the entire PLO film archive in Beirut and erasing decades of revolutionary documentation. This was no accident. The destruction of culture is a deliberate tactic of colonial powers because memory itself is dangerous. Yet, as with every phase of the Palestinian struggle, defeat bred renewal. Filmmakers scattered across exile returned with a new determination to rebuild cinema, this time moving beyond propaganda into complex explorations of memory, exile, and everyday survival. New Voices, Global Struggles and Palestinian Cinema Today The 1990s onwards saw Palestinian cinema take a new form. Directors such as Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, Annemarie Jacir, Najwa Najjar, and Rashid Masharawi moved towards feature films that could compete on the international stage while retaining a core of resistance. This was not a break from politics but a broadening of the struggle and showing the occupation not only in the moment of battle but also in the humiliations of checkpoints, the fragmentation of families, and the stubborn persistence of joy and love. Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee (1987) depicted the contradictions of celebrating life under military rule. Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) used satire to ridicule the absurdity of apartheid, while It Must Be Heaven (2019) globalised the Palestinian condition and showed that exile and alienation are not confined to one geography. Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013) grappled with the ethical weight of resistance under relentless criminalisation by imperialist media. Women filmmakers such as Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, 2008) and Najwa Najjar (Between Heaven and Earth, 2019) pushed Palestinian cinema towards feminist terrains, where love, labour, and longing intersect with the violence of occupation. Their films insist that Palestinian identity cannot be flattened into victimhood; it is alive, creative, and resilient, with women at its centre. For Marxists, what is striking is how Palestinian cinema exposes imperialism’s cultural machinery. Hollywood, European media, and Zionist propaganda have long dehumanised Palestinians, casting them either as terrorists or as faceless masses. Palestinian filmmakers contest this ideological hegemony. Every international award, every screening in Cannes or Venice, becomes not only artistic success but political defiance: proof that Palestine exists, that Palestinians create, dream, and narrate their own lives. Even in Gaza, under the suffocating blockade, young filmmakers use digital tools to produce short films and documentaries that travel globally. Their circulation across social media connects Palestine to other sites of struggle, from Black liberation movements in the United States to anti-colonial resistance in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This solidarity is no coincidence; it emerges from a shared understanding that imperialism everywhere depends on silencing the oppressed. Today, Palestinian cinema faces immense challenges: lack of funding, mobility restrictions, censorship, and the destruction of cultural spaces. But despite these, it thrives because it is anchored not in markets but in mass struggle. It is part of what Marxists call the artistic front, the battle of ideas, images, and narratives that accompanies every revolutionary struggle. Just as the writings of Ghassan Kanafani or the murals on the walls of refugee camps, films serve as weapons of collective memory and international solidarity. In conclusion, Palestinian cinema is not just a national art form. It is a front of the anti-imperialist struggle. It challenges Zionist settler-colonialism, resists the erasures of U.S.-led imperial hegemony, and speaks to oppressed peoples everywhere. In every frame lies a refusal to be reduced to silence. In every story, there is the vision of a free Palestine and part of the larger dream of global liberation from imperialism. প্রকাশের তারিখ: ১০-সেপ্টেম্বর-২০২৫ |
© কপিরাইট ভারতের কমিউনিস্ট পার্টি (মার্কসবাদী) - পশ্চিমবঙ্গ রাজ্য কমিটি, সর্বস্বত্ব সংরক্ষিত ভারতের কমিউনিস্ট পার্টি (মার্কসবাদী) - পশ্চিমবঙ্গ রাজ্য কমিটি
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