Films about the Palestinian liberation struggle—housed in a Japanese archive—are interwoven to create an essay on transnational solidarity and cinema as propaganda.
Director: Mohanad Yaqubi
Runtime: 71 min
Fest Year: 2023
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the campaign for Palestinian self-determination was accompanied by a series of 16mm propaganda films made by filmmakers from around the world. For many in Japan, the Palestinian struggle mirrored their own sense of oppression from the United States following World War II, and these films found a receptive audience there. The films were archived by the Japanese left in a potent gesture of transnational solidarity. Pulling from a range of these films, director Mohanad Yaqubi creates an engrossing audio-visual essay that bears witness to this solidarity and meditates on the question of cinema as propaganda. Moreover, the film makes a case for the archival impulse. As its epigraph from Jacques Derrida states, “What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.” (JA)