In his 2003 keynote at the Dreams of a Nation Palestinian film festival, Edward Said underscored the importance of Palestinian filmmaking as a “visible incarnation of Palestinian existence in the years since 1948.” In the most literal terms, Palestinian cinema offers visible proof of their existence as a people, challenging Zionist fantasies of terra nullius and the related, ongoing erasures––material, historical, and cultural––of Israeli settler-colonialism. As with Italian Neorealism and the Soviet school of the 1920s, Palestinian cinema was forged in the crucible of social and political crisis, and continues to be conceptualized as a tool of political persuasion, mobilization, and resistance. The birth of Palestinian militant cinema during the Palestinian Revolution (1968–82) is the subject of Nadia Yaqub's important, comprehensive study Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (2018). Yaqub examines the evolution of political filmmaking under the auspices of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) film unit (Aflam Filastin), and the emergence of cinema as a site of complex negotiations between politics and aesthetics, and between Palestinian nationalists, international leftists, and liberation movements in the Global South. The book documents the filmmakers, films, and militant aesthetics that came into being during this pivotal period in the history of the Palestinian struggle. It is the first detailed study of this largely undocumented body of work.

Throughout the period under discussion, the Palestinian people's struggle for national liberation and return formed a cornerstone of global resistance to imperialism and colonial oppression. It captured the imagination of filmmakers from the Arab world and beyond. The Tricontinental Conference of 1966 forged solidarities within the international left, manifesting in political and cultural cooperation between Palestinians and revolutionaries worldwide. Cinema––particularly documentary––became a staple tool of education and dissemination, engaging revolutionary ideologies that were at once national and internationalist, progressive and popular, anticolonial and socially emancipatory. Lightweight handheld cameras and faster film stock unlocked a visceral medium for communicating a “revolutionary truth directly to Palestinian and global audiences” (p. 56). Recording militant activities also formed part of the PLO's archival practice, which sought to document unfolding events for future generations. One of the strengths of Yaqub's book is the extent to which she brings to life the extraordinary ideological and creative synergies of the Tricontinental era. Meticulously detailing the material conditions of production and distribution, the influence of Third World Cinema, the film festival circuits (Leipzig, Carthage, Damascus, to name a few) and the involvement of allied filmmakers, Yaqub pays tribute to the breadth and richness of the ideas inherited and advanced by Palestinian revolutionaries and their allies.

In the wake of the cataclysmic events of 1948, Palestinians became the objects of Western paternalism and were represented as passive victims without agency in the mainstream media. Sands of Sorrow (1950), the first film about refugees (produced by the Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees for fundraising purposes), epitomizes this objectifying “humanitarian gaze.” Like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's (UNRWA) early photographs of camp life, the film depicts refugees as helpless recipients of aid. The opening chapter of Yaqub's book explores how Palestinian artists and writers challenged this discourse of humiliation through new nationalist narratives, in which Palestinians coalesced as historical actors and a people. Yaqub probes the role of visual culture in articulating collective tragedy, reaffirming dignity, and mobilizing for liberation; presents the emergence of militant cinema as a counterpoint to mainstream discourse; and situates it within this broader history of cultural production, invoking the work of prominent writers and painters such as Ghassan Kanafani, Samirah ʿAzzam, Ibrahim Ghannam, Ismail Shammout, and Tamam al-Akhal. The nationalist imagery created by this generation of artists laid the groundwork for “an agential Palestinian consciousness upon which the Palestinian revolution could be built” (p. 46).

In 1968 the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) was established in Jordan. Spearheaded by Mustafa Abu Ali and Hani Jawhariyah, the aim was to document the revolutionary armed struggle from within. The three core chapters of the book chart the work of the PFU (later, the Palestinian Cinema Institute), its attempts to produce radical forms that could embody the spirit of revolution and “intervene in the flow of information and images about Palestinian events” (p. 56). Through “event films”––for example, No to a Peaceful Solution (1970), which documented demonstrations against the Rogers Plan in Amman, and With Soul and With Blood (1971), shot during the Black September massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian army––PFU filmmakers sought to educate and mobilize, by communicating the necessity of violent struggle. Chapter 2 discusses the formal experimentation of these early years, foregrounding Abu Ali's work, whose film They Do Not Exist (1974), about the Israeli destruction of Nabatiyah Camp, is among the best-known films from this period. Yaqub addresses the influence of Third Cinema, as individual interests were subordinated to a collective vision (a position that departed from the caméra-stylos of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, who worked with the PFU). She also chronicles the involvement of the alternative cinema movement and pan-Arab filmmakers (notably, Kais al-Zubaidi, Kassem Hawal, and Christian Ghazi), who produced pro-Palestinian films within Syrian public sector cinema, and transnational collaborations (with Monica Maurer, Johan van der Keuken, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Masao Adachi, Koji Wakamatsu, and others) that also shaped PLO cinema in the 1970s.

The Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1982 marked the end of the revolutionary experiment and the PLO's forced evacuation to Tunis. The film unit dispersed, and the PCI archive disappeared; until this day it is not clear whether it was destroyed, lost, looted, or might still turn up. While a significant number of the films produced during the revolution have been found in other collections, much of the material is missing. For many Palestinian scholars and artists, the lost archive exerts a spectral power––imagined as an inestimably precious resource, one that might unlock an earlier era of promise and offer insight as to why the revolution failed. Yaqub's concluding chapters address the afterlives and legacies of revolutionary images, and the significance of recent efforts to restore and disseminate films and photographs from the revolution by Palestinian artists and filmmakers (as well as by community-run initiatives, such as the Tall al-Zaʾtar Facebook groups commemorating the siege and fall of the camp in 1976). Yaqub is alive to the paradox of reviving Palestinian militant cinema through research, restoration, curation, and exhibition where the ethos of revolution in action recedes from view with each new projection on a white-cube wall. She offsets this risk by underscoring the political significance of recent films by Mohanad Yaqubi, Emily and Annemarie Jacir, and others, which reclaim and revivify this earlier “cinematic patrimony” as a means to reimagine liberation in “post-national” terms, and the possibility of an “identity that is no longer tied to a future Palestinian state” (p. 215).

In six chapters, Yaqub deftly illuminates a series of shifts in the filmic conceptualization and representation of Palestinian resistance over the past fifty years. The arc she traces is a dispiriting one. The dazzling experimentation with montage, asynchronous sound, and non-linearity of Abu Ali's early films, which sought to both evoke and enact revolution, has been gradually replaced by more ambivalently pacifist, didactic appeals to international audiences that attempt to speak truth to power. The collectivist politics of revolution have been whittled away to the “individual work-arounds” of life under occupation (p. 10). This post-Oslo impasse––compounded by the failure of the two-state solution, the rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority, the siege of Gaza, the deepening apartheid conditions in the West Bank, and the severing of Palestinian governance—has found its form, Yaqub suggests, in “roadblock movies” that evoke the anxiety of life lived between proliferating checkpoints.

Palestinian Cinema elegantly weaves together a diverse array of sources––correspondence, personal interviews, memoirs, and other vital primary and secondary materials, including key revolutionary journals (al-Hurriya, Filasteen al-Thawra and Shuʾun)––and appends a comprehensive filmography of PLO films produced between 1968 and 1982. That the book sometimes reads more as a compendium than a critical study is both a strength and weakness. While Yaqub describes her approach as one that “begins with close readings of the films” (p. 12), the visual analysis sometimes feels thin, and the infrastructure of production and circulation are foregrounded over the meanings forged through the films themselves, or accounts of their reception and viewership. Yaqub sometimes seems uncertain whether she's writing a historical account of people and movements, or a study of revolutionary aesthetics—an ambivalence that mirrors, not coincidentally, debates from the 1970s about whether cinema should provide a historical record or offer political analysis and revolutionary impetus. Nonetheless, this book represents an invaluable and compelling contribution to scholarship on Palestinian filmmaking, Palestinian cultural production, and transnational, Tricontinental solidarity. It opens a window to a luminous period of revolutionary production that, until now, has been largely inaccessible to English-language readers, and invites reengagement with these vital, visionary works in a moment where inspiration is urgently needed.