Ibtisām Marāʿanah Menuhin's seventh documentary, Sajjil Anāʿarabī / Write Down, I Am an Arab is a visual attempt to create an intimate portrayal of Maḥmūd Darwīsh, a Palestinian refugee who became a national poet in exile. The film is based on an assemblage of interviews with Darwīsh in Hebrew, recordings from his poetry readings in Arabic, and personal testimonies from close family members, ex-lovers, and friends about his private life in the homeland and in exile. The testimonies of his Hebrew teacher, Shoshana Lapidot and his ex-lover Tamar Ben ʿAmi stand out in particular as a focal point of a Jewish-Israeli memory of Darwīsh. Highlighting these testimonies as foundational entry points into Darwīsh's life story privileges the Israeli archive. It also reveals two subtexts that dominate the film from beginning to end: First, the poet's life story is intended primarily for an Israeli audience. Second, this audience is about to discover that the Palestinian national poet whose poetry was banned from Israeli schools, had, after all, an unknown/untold “Israeli side” to his story.

The paradox of recognition and erasure that presents Darwīsh from this perspective is evident in the first scene of the film. The camera zooms in on Darwīsh's shabby Israeli ID, which simultaneously recognizes his destroyed village, Al-Birweh, as his birthplace, and erases his Palestinian identity by registering his ethnicity as an Arab. Interestingly enough, the Israeli Ministry of Interior didn't look carefully into Darwīsh's green eyes and marked them as blue. This mechanism of colonial Ashkenization is ironically reflected throughout the documentary, which follows the same order of the ID: Hebrew first, Arabic second. Darwīsh's first words in the film are in Hebrew, recorded from old interviews with the Israeli press. They are followed by an audio collection of his poetry reading in Arabic. Although Darwīsh reflects later in the movie on his complicated relationship with Hebrew, when he says: “Hebrew was the language that I spoke with the foreigner who came to my land, with the policeman, the military governor, the Hebrew teacher, and the beloved” (09:10), the documentary fails to address this complexity. On the contrary, it normalizes Hebrew by featuring only interviews with Darwīsh in Hebrew from different stages of his life in the homeland and in exile. These fragments of interviews represent the Israeli archive. His poetry in Arabic, on the other hand, is presented as a separate archive. Without translation, it remains excluded from the Israeli archive.

One of the most compelling aspects of Sajjil Anāʿarabī / Write Down, I Am an Arab is its presentation of early visual documentations of Palestinians from the period of the Military Rule, 1949–1966. These images reveal rare and valuable footages of the Nakba and everyday life in Palestinian villages captured by both ethnographic and surveillance cameras of the Israeli state apparatus. This unusual access to these photos and the funding that this documentary received because of the director's Israeli citizenship privileges, including support from three major Israeli cultural institutions—the New Fund For Cinema and Television (NFCT), Yes Doco, and Pais Council for Arts and Culture—raise critical questions about the structural limitations imposed on Palestinian independent filmmaking. Palestinian filmmakers are generally denied access to Israeli archives. This also applies to Palestinian filmmakers in Israel who do not receive government funding or boycott the Israeli state cultural apparatus. Moreover, similar Palestinian archives are precarious. In addition to being geographically scattered around the world, they lack adequate institutional support, and as the salvation of PLO film archive from Lebanon demonstrates, the Palestinian archive has a long history of being vulnerable to looting and destruction.

Despite the director's explicit cinematic attempts to present Darwīsh's life through a joint and “balanced” Palestinian–Israeli narrative, made explicit in her public statements in several interviews, the documentary largely fails to achieve this balance because of its focus on Darwīsh's relationship with Tamar Ben ʿAmi, his Jewish lover and the inspiration for his famous 1967 poem “Rita and the Rifle.” In its preoccupation with this supposedly unknown side of Darwīsh, the film ends up elevating Ben Ami to one of the most important people in Darwīsh's life. The exclusive media value of her appearance in the documentary—Ben ʿAmi does not appear in other documentaries about Darwīsh—also sensationalizes Darwīsh's personal life. Juxtaposition of footage of Ben ʿAmi as a woman in her sixties sitting in her apartment in Berlin with her well-kept archive of poetic love letters that Darwīsh wrote in Hebrew from an Israeli prison in the 1960s reminiscing about her sixteen-year old young self in Haifa, and Rita of the poem presents a confusing and unconvincing blurring of biography and poetic practice. Ben ʿAmi may well have been the inspiration for Rita, but Darwīsh's poem is not only, or even primarily about her. This tension in the politics of memory and the difference between Rita and the poem on the one hand, and Ben ʿAmi and her memories and life experiences on the other, underlines the visual structure of the film. However, the assemblage of footage from Haifa, Berlin, and Paris and the director's attempt to recreate Ben ʿAmi's romantic nostalgia by following her efforts to reconnect with Darwīsh decades after their separation reveal the relatively marginal significance of this early love affair to Darwīsh's life in exile. To Ben ʿAmi's bitter disappointment, he agrees to see her only once for a brief meeting in Paris.

While Ben ʿAmi's nostalgia is featured as the main source for revealing intimate details about Darwīsh's life before exile, the documentary also includes fragments of interviews with other significant people in his life: his biological brother, Ahmad, his adopted brother and comrade, the Palestinian poet, Samīh Al-Qāsim, and his ex-wife Ranā Qabbānī. None of them mention Darwīsh's love affair with Ben ʿAmi. Their memories focus on respectively recalling the internal struggles of Darwīsh the brother, the friend, and the husband. Ahmad reflects on his brother's persecution by the military governor and the difficulties he endured in Israeli prison, which eventually forced him into exile. Al-Qāsim laments the spiritual separation that Darwīsh experienced as a result of this exile. He also dismisses the idea that Darwīsh's exile furthered the development of the modern Arabic poem. In her living room in Paris, Qabbānī shares family albums, her translation of Darwīsh's poetry, amid vivid descriptions of their passionate, yet short-lived marriage(s). Through these accounts, the viewer gains a deeper insight into the complex character of Darwīsh and the effects of exile on his identity as a man, a poet, and a Palestinian.

The last scene in the documentary features a recording of Darwīsh's exit from the stage after his last poetry reading in Ramallah before his death in 2008. He fades out from the frame leaving behind a cheering Palestinian audience who saw in his poetry its collective voice. This dramatic scene seals Darwīsh's life, but only as another fragment from the archive, disconnected from the testimonies of his brother, Al-Qāsim, and Qabbānī.

Unlike other documentaries about Darwīsh, such as Simone Bitton's Mahmoud Darwich: Et La Terre, Comme La Langue/ As the Land Is the Language (1997) and Nāṣrī Ḥajjāj's Kamā Qāla Al-Shāʿir /As the Poet Said (2010), Marāʿanah Menuhin's Sajjil Anāʿarabī presents Darwīsh through a hegemonic colonial discourse about hybridity, conflicted Palestinian-Israeli identity, and fragments of memory that camouflage the complex life of the poet and the influence of his poetry in the Arab world and beyond.