Part of Media City Film Festival 2024

Mustafa Abu Ali, Palestine, 16mm > digital, 26 min, 1974

In the late 1960s, a group of young Arab women and men devoted to the struggle for Palestinian freedom chose to contribute to the resistance through filmmaking, recording their lives, hopes, and their fight for justice. Working in both fiction and documentary, they strived to tell the stories of Palestine and to create a new kind of cinema. Their films screened across the Arab world and internationally but never in Palestine. None of the filmmakers were allowed into Palestine, or what became known as Israel, let alone their prints.—Annemarie Jacir, The Electronic Intifada

Salvaged from the ruins of Beirut after 1982, They Do Not Exist has only recently been widely available. Conceived as a response to Golda Meir’s infamous statement, “There were no such things as the Palestinians … They did not exist,” and shot under extraordinary conditions, the film covers conditions in Lebanon’s refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. Now recognized as a cornerstone in the development of Palestinian cinema, the film only received its national premiere in 2003, when a group of Palestinian artists “smuggled” the director into a makeshift cinema in his hometown of Jerusalem (into which Israel barred his entry). Abu Ali, who saw his film for the first time in more than 20 years at this clandestine event, noted, “We used to say ‘Art for the Struggle,’ now it’s ‘Struggle for the Art.’” —Palestine Film Foundation

This copy of They Do Not Exist was remastered and provided by No Name Cinema.

Streaming Details: This film is available to stream globally.

Program Partners: This film is co-presented with No Name Cinema.