Fertile Memory

The film "Searching for Freedom: The Holy Land Foundation" is a two part documentary focussing on the story of the Holy Land Foundation, established in the late 80s by three Americans from Palestinian origin, Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi and Mohammad El-Mezain. The foundation aimed to supply humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Palestine and countries hosting Palestinian refugees, it later became the largest charity association in the US to distribute humanitarian aid to Palestinians. After 9/11, the former US President George W. Bush issued a decision to shut down the Holy Land Foundation and freeze its assets. In 2007 the Holy Land Foundation trials began, where five of its members were charged with funding terrorism and sending money to Hamas, a blacklisted political group in the US. A second trial for the Holy Land Foundation members took place in 2008, which issued the convictions of five members of the Foundation and their sentencing of 65 years imprisonment.

Documentary about war photographer James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever.

Liat Atzili was kidnapped from her kibbutz on October 7. What begins as a chronicle of her parents, sister, and children's efforts to secure her return, becomes a portrait of conflicting impulses towards anger, indifference, and compassion straining the bonds of one grieving family.

A Palestinian activist's fight for freedom draws a Japanese American filmmaker into confrontation with detention regimes of past and present.

The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.

The Tank and The Olive Tree recalls a certain number of forgotten fundamentals and sheds new light on the history of Palestine. By combining geopolitical analysis, interviews with international personalities who are experts on the subject and testimonies from Palestinian and French citizens, this documentary offers the keys to understanding what the media call the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Enough to rid people's minds of clichés and prejudices! If The Chariot and the Olivier is intended to be educational, it speaks above all of a magnificent territory, and of a people who constantly affirm that “to live is already to resist”...

Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.

In May 1974, the Israeli Air Force carried out an extermination operation against the Palestinian refugee camp Nabatiyeh. With this as a starting point, it is reviewed how the last 50 years of Zionist colonization of Palestine have partly led to the establishment of the state of Israel, partly to the expulsion of a people, the Palestinians, from their land. The film shows scenes of daily life in Palestinian refugee camps. We hear various of the inhabitants talk about their desire to return to their country, and we follow how the resistance movement works to free women from their traditional backward role. At the same time, the emergence of the armed resistance struggle is analysed, and the significance of the latest military technological developments for guerilla wars in the 3rd world is explained.

The film explores the first Palestinian Intifada against the Israeli Occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It shows moving images of resistance against the Israeli occupation, while exploring the steadfast determination of the Palestinian People, confronting a modern army with stones. The film highlights the active and important role of women in the intifada.

This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers and the alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.

Going behind the usual images of war-torn Gaza, Swiss documentarian Nicolas Wadimoff offers this look at how people survive despite constant threat of danger. Children still play, rappers still create music and families still love one another. In addition to visiting the United Nations Food Distribution Center, Wadimoff films at a derelict amusement park and profiles the DARG TeaM rappers, whose politically charged music proclaims their defiance.

With the most tech startups and venture capital per capita in the world, Israel has long been hailed as The Startup Nation. WIRED’s feature-length documentary looks beyond Tel Aviv’s vibrant, liberal tech epicenter to the wider Holy Land region – the Palestinian territories, where a parallel Startup Nation story is emerging in East Jerusalem, Nazareth, Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank, as well as in the Israeli cybersecurity hub of Be’er Sheva. And we will learn how the fertile innovation ecosystem of Silicon Wadi has evolved as a result of its unique political, geographical and cultural situation and explore the future challenges – and solutions – these nations are facing.

Unspoken or إحكِ is about Palestinian spoken word poet Farah Chamma who, at the age of 17, became an online sensation after her poems went viral. Today, Farah finds her poetry at odds with the world she lives in. The film shows her conflict as she struggles with self-censorship and keeping her poetry authentic and real.

12 August 2002 is the date which was printed on every shot in this film by the memory of the camera. On that day a huge tower which disrupted the north wing of an abandoned castle was torn down, floor by floor. The film is a record of the methodical disruption of this building by inhuman and all-powerful machines. The voice-over consists of a phone call by the author John Berger (1926), who has written numerous and radical opinion pieces in favour of the people of Palestine.

In 2021, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was attacked. The war lasted for 11 days, during which all forms of weapons were used. This left many victims, along with a great loss of buildings and infrastructure. But, maybe more importantly, it created deep psychological effects on all who lived through it, many of them children

In July 1988, Mizue Furui was in the Gaza Strip and West Bank with her camera as a rookie freelance journalist. Covering the Palestinian condition, she became acquainted with Ghada Ageel, a 23-year-old teacher at an elementary school, in November 1993 and started shooting her life up to when she turned 35. The 12 years Furui spent shooting still and video images has borne fruit in a documentary titled "Ghada -- Songs of Palestine," which will be released in Uplink Theater in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, in May as a rare report on women in the traditionally male-oriented Palestinian society.

The film returns to the origins of the creation of the State of Israel (from 1896 to 1948) and highlights the responsibility of the Western World.

Guy Hircefeld, a veteran who served in the Israeli military at the start of its occupation of Palestine in the 1980s, now fights against the Israeli occupation. His only weapon is a camera.

A road trip through the hills, valleys and villages of Palestine, following Murad, the cinema-lover who has made it his mission to bring Palestinian cinema to Palestinians in forgotten and marginal communities in the West Bank.

Tawfiq’s Reef chronicles the plight of Palestinian fishermen in Gaza, heavily restricted in the area in which they can fish, often indebted, shot at, harassed or imprisoned by the Israeli Navy on the narrow sliver of fishing waters available to them off the Gaza coastline, making this one of the most dangerous professions in the world.