They Do Indeed Exist: Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit, by Khadijeh Habashneh

“…photography is as important to us as fighting because it disseminates our image to the world.”

– Abu Jihad

The Palestine Film Unit was a filmmaking collective that operated largely out of Lebanon and Jordan from 1968 through the late 1980s. It was intended as to be part of the larger Fatah movement, and was the first, in the words of its co-founders, Mustafa Abu Ali, in “developing a militant Palestinian cinema” (p. 39), militant cinema being the operative word relative to its cousin the documentary film – directly inspired by similar movements in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam. In the introduction to the English translation of Knights of Cinema, Khadijeh Habashneh acknowledges that the PFU filmography –and upon finishing her book, a corpus of semi-autobiographical surveys of Palestinian cinema that predates the Gulf War – is one that has largely been ignored by the western canon. 

It’s likely that it was not until Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip in October 2023 that the latest generation of Western audiences had even heard of any of the movement’s best-known films, several of which were made by Abu Ali – specifically Bi-al-ruwh bi-al-dam (With Soul, With Blood, 1971), Mashahid min al-ihtilal fi Ghazza (Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, 1973), Lays Iahum wujud (They Do Not Exist, 1974), Filastin fi al-ayn (Palestine in the Eye, 1977) and Tel al-Za’atar (1977). Atfal walakin (Children Without Childhood aka Children Nevertheless, 1979), directed by Habashneh herself, was made in response to the United Nations’ International Declaration of Child Rights. The production of these films, however, indirectly reveals a decades-long cinematic movement that until recently has remained a secret. As the movement grew into the Palestine Cinema Institution, adopted new members and partnerships with Palestinian organizations, and undertook international collaborations, the corpus expanded to include films by Jean Chamoun, Qais al-Zubaidi and Samir Nimr from Iraq, Amman-born Palestinian Mai al-Masri, Monica Maurer from Germany, and the Palestinian art historian Ismail Shammout – the two most widely-seen from before 1990 arguably being Al-falastini (The Palestinian, 1977) and A’id ila Hayfa (Return to Haifa, 1981).

While several books on the PFU were published in Arabic while the movement took place (and similarly omitted from the larger canon of western cinema, in part perhaps due to language barriers) – including Mustafa Abu Ali and Hassan Abu Ghanimeh’s About the Palestinian Cinema (1975), Walid Chmait and Guy Hennebelle’s Palestine in Cinema (1977), Ghanimeh’s Palestine and the Cinematic Eye (1981), and Hussein Oudat’s Cinema and the Palestinian Cause (1987) – what distinguishes Habashneh’s book from previous works on the topic – most of which almost by necessity incorporate an element of autobiography, as hers does – as in how it abides by the Oral History: the book is almost literally a collage of memory fragments of those involved in the PFU. There is no one biographical account to provide a throughline, which one might be led to believe would be Habashneh and her partner Abu Ali. The book instead gives the reader the impression of a filmmaking collective, despite how one gleans from the scarce accounts of the movement that Ali perhaps emerged as a de facto leader. However Habashneh depicts the oral histories ultimately from a first-person perspective, with headings such as “Mustafa’s recollection of ___,” “Salah’s recollection of ___,” “My recollection of ___,” and so on. 

The narrative nonetheless begins in Jordan in 1968 after battle of Al-Karameh, when global interest in the Arab countries – and the demand for photographs and newsreel footage of those countries – increased. The stature of the three de facto founders (Abu Ali, Sulafa Jadallah, and Hani Jawharieh) cannot be understated. All were born prior to the Israeli occupation, and came from relatively privileged origins: Ali was born in Jerusalem in 1940 and studied at both the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Film Technique. Jadallah was born in Nablus in 1941 and educated at the Higher Institute of Cinema (HIC) in Cairo, and is the first Arab woman cinematographer. Jawharieh was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and also studied at the HIC.

The sheer amount of information presented in such an epistolary form can be daunting, though this may only be from the perspective of a Western reader accustomed to filmmaker profiles that deploy a romanticizing variation of auteur theory. Contrary to this, Habashneh emphasizes the egalitarian and communal nature of the PFU as an extension of a greater cause. “We rarely spoke about ourselves or shared intimate details of our lives, as if life before the revolution was no longer relevant” (p. 75), says Nimr, who was among several PFU members to emerge conversely from a military background. Regarding would-be Palestinian filmmakers from this time, a pattern emerges similar to the radicalizing process: with each major conflict – the an-Naksah of 1967, Black September 1970-1971, etc. – a greater number of Arabs join the Palestinian revolution as photographers and cinematographers, with the PFU now being a component of that revolution. Habashneh’s corpus of testimony and recollection is best received then as a portrait of a collective effort rather than of self-stylized auteur filmmakers.

First logo of the Palestine Film Unit

Yet the PFU was hardly insular and quickly became an international movement by proxy. Members attended filmmaking workshops in Baghdad, Budapest, and Damascus, and received donated film equipment from the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. Productions often required the cooperation between numerous countries throughout the Arab world and elsewhere, not unlike the international productions occurring in Europe at the same time. By 1970, the PFU saw the arrival of leftist filmmakers such as Ugo Adilardi, Jean-Luc Godard, Luigi Perelli and Kōji Wakamatsu, all made or attempted to make films addressing the Palestinian struggle. A group of Argentinian filmmakers arrived in Beirut in 1971 to collaborate on a film shot by the PFU and edited on a Moviola in Rome under the auspices of Enzo Rossellini (son of Roberto). A recollection from Ghanimeh states: “Exposure to the opinions of filmmakers including the Cuban Santiago Álvarez, German Manfred Foss, French Serge Le Péron, Indian Mrinal Sen, and Senegalese Ousmane Sembène, among others, convinced us that the unit was headed in the right direction alongside other militant and revolutionary cinemas” (p. 68).

Though the book progresses more or less chronologically, the reader must work to build a history from an epistolary record. One gleans the establishment of the Palestinian Cinema Group (PCG) in November 1972, which included filmmakers from Egypt and Jordan, and begat the use of French news footage in Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza, the consolidation of the PFU to the Palestinian Cinema Institute (PCI), the growth of the PCI to include its own cinematheque and archive, and the establishment of Palestinian Image magazine. There is the move into narrative fiction films in 1972-1973 with the unrealized Days of Love and Death based on Rashad Abu Shawer’s novel, and The Pessoptimist which was to be produced by Mustafa al-Aqqad, perhaps the Arabic name in the book best-known to Western filmgoers, as he was the producer (credited as “Moustapha Akkad”) of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). There is the expansion across several Palestinian organizations in the mid-1970s including the Popular and Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, DFLP), resulting in screenings at festivals in Baghdad, Berlin, Karlovy Vary, Leipzig, Moscow, and Oberhausen, and collaborations on The Palestinian, and Return to Haifa. The PFU/PCI’s history is marked by two major dispersions: the first being after Black September, when the fedayeen had to uproot from their bases in Jordan, and the second taking place after the PLO left Lebanon. The last of the organization’s films were made towards the end of the 1980s, with the dissolution of the PFU/PCI coinciding somewhat with the PLO allying themselves with the Iraqi regime during the Gulf War, a move that Rashid Khalidi has characterized as a miscalculation in public relations for the Palestinian cause.

The final chapter addresses the search for various lost Palestinian films, which began almost two decades later in 2004 and recovered over 60 films by 2016. It was also by this time that With Soul, With Blood, Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, and They Do Not Exist were digitized. In the same decade art historian Rona Sela and journalist Ofer Aderet exposed that Israel had stolen much of the archive, and to this day is still holding it in the Israeli Army Archives. The book contains a number of useful appendices featuring the manifestos of the various film organizations, correspondence between Ali and Habashneh, filmographies from the PFU and PCI, and biographies of various members.

The Western reader will glean some almost fundamental differences in film production and exhibition between his or her own experience – and even the filmmaking and filmgoing experience of the Arab world at large (which was and is admittedly influenced by the Western studio system) – and that the PFU. For instance, during a typical shoot, PFU members all took on multiple roles, since “…precaution underlined the Palestine Film Unit’s understanding of the revolution’s context of crisis and battles where the team could lose one of its members at any moment” (p. 60). With that in mind, consider the book’s recollections of the struggle to get Tel al-Za’atar developed – with the filmmakers resorting to travel to Italy and then to France – all while the under siege by Israel, serves as a corollary to many (often naïve) western notions of wartime cinema, such as when John Milius suggested filming Apocalypse Now in Vietnam while the war was still taking place. The prestige of festival screenings aside, fundamental to the PFU’s mission was to screen films at fedayeen bases and refugee camps, with little regard for exhibiting in commercial cinemas. At the time, the easiest way to screen films across the Arab world was on television, though this depended on Palestine’s relationship to each individual country: Algeria, Kuwait, and Qatar all ran PFU films on television throughout the 1970s.

The text – written and compiled around 2019 – assumes the reader is already familiar with major events that informed the Unit from 1968 forward, such as Al-Karameh and Black September, the Israeli attack on Al-Arqoub, and so on. Given the elliptical nature of its construction, the reader does have to occasionally work to piece together the fragments (certain figures such as Omar al-Mukhtar are referenced before they are introduced, for instance). The translation from an array of source reveals numerous names for the same entity (i.e. “International Film Festival for Youth in Damascus” and “Damascus Festival for Youth Cinema”), and gives only an impression of organizational structure of the PFU and its affiliates (the organization of the resistance as not so different from that of a corporate studio structure in that every Palestinian organization retained its own information office and cinema committee). This is perhaps more the fallout of the amount of “raw data” the book contains. Habashneh has assembled an exhaustive amount of primary sources in the form of interviews and memoirs and limited secondary sources in the form of surveys of Palestinian cinema – yet written for the most by those who experienced that history firsthand.

Samir Nimir and Khadijeh Habashneh, ca. 1979

Nevertheless, several topical elements and now-familiar images emerge throughout the book. One is its relevance the reader can attribute to many of today’s concerns regarding film criticism and the state of affairs in Palestine today: the members’ various recollections of Godard’s appearance in Palestine in 1970, for instance, extrapolate the divide between Western leftist conceptions of the Palestinian Revolution from the outside at the time and those directly involved and affected by it, specifically the belief that Godard had no business in a role that is better occupied by a Palestinian filmmaker. As early as the beginning of the occupation, there are eerily prescient memories of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the loss of or seizure of footage by Israel after their targeting of buildings in Beirut known to house Palestinian news agencies, and of entire offices and arrays of film equipment powered by generators due to electricity loss, and filming lines of people waiting for water due to shortages. Throughout the book one reads of the constant disruption of both productions and screenings by war activity and of the deaths of several members throughout the late 1970s during the Israeli bombardments of Southern Lebanon – specifically Ibrahim Naser and Abdelhafeth al-Asmar, who had collaborated with Vanessa Redgrave on The Palestinian (Roy Batterby, 1977). The book features a recollection of Habashneh and Ali themselves fleeing the June-August 1982 bombardment with their kids.

The reader is also left thinking on the present circumstances in Palestine with regard for the PFU’s concerns over popular media presentations and reportage of Occupied Palestine, specifically who tells (is allowed to tell) the story and who in turn funds and benefits from the storytelling. Habashneh elaborates on their reception and use of footage shot by a French television crew (8 of an original 20 minutes) in Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza:

[T]he Palestine Film Unit received some footage filmed in Occupied Palestine from a European television crew that had relations with the unit, which sometimes exchanged film footage or facilitated meetings with the leadership. The material received was from Gaza, the most revolutionary city in Occupied Palestine in the early 1970s. Mustafa was very pleased with the material as he started brainstorming ways of using it in a film about the life of the Palestinian people in Gaza under occupation. However, the European television crew who shot this footage were accompanied by Occupation forces. This meant that the behaviour of the Zionist soldiers was less violent, or at least slightly more considerate in these circumstances, and as such, the footage can be considered as promoting the behaviour of the occupying soldiers (p. 87).

This stands of course in stark contrast to late 2023 and early 2024, where smartphone technology, the internet, social media have allowed unprecedented coverage through the de facto reporting of Plestia al-Aqad, Motaz Azaiza, and Bisan Owda to come out of Gaza in the earliest months of the siege, no longer limited by biased coverage of Western news media: “We do not photograph important events to respond to demands for high-speed newsgathering. We photograph as part of the revolution, and we cannot capitalize on people’s pain. Our work is humanistic more than it is journalistic. We look for the truth, not for the news as such” (pp. 99-100).

Khadijeh Habashneh, Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit, translated by Samirah Alkassim and Nadine Fattaleh (London: Palgrave, 2023).