While festivals throughout the Region, and beyond, senselessly cancel their latest edition “in support” of the Palestinian cause, the best thing they could do would be to finally showcase cinema from Palestinian and Israeli auteurs, as well as one American filmmaker, who can collectively help explains the situation and smother the fire of warmongers with culture and education.

Call it a gigantic missed opportunity, but honestly, all these festivals in the Region, and Arab film festivals throughout the world, which are cancelling their latest editions in support of the Palestinian people are actually doing them, and the world a disservice. Cinema heals, cinema unites and unless it’s Egypt, where a policeman shot and killed two Israeli tourists and their local tour guide in Alexandria earlier this month, cancelling film festivals left and right is uncalled for. It is during these times that cinema is needed most, as was the case in 2016 in Venice, when the festival went on, without parties and fanfare but still it took place, following the big earthquake in central Italy in August. What is that old saying? The show must go on! And people need something other than the unrelenting news of doom and gloom to go on.

If I were a film programmer, and trust me you’d want to attend my film festival, these are the films I would program right now, as required viewing for all before they are even allowed to speak about the conflict. Sounds a bit harsh? Desperate times call for desperate measures and cinema is always a great place to start, when wishing to understand an era or an area.

MIRAL by Julian Schnabel

Yes, I can the hear the collective ‘Oy!’ from my colleagues who are critics about this title. But read on and listen to my argument. Yes, Julian Schnabel made this film while dating the autobiographical book’s author, Rula Jebreal; yes, he cast Indian actress Freida Pinto as Miral, Jebreal’s alter ego — but I still consider, with every fiber of my body Miral (2010) an underrated masterpiece that needs to be watched, and studied to understand the full scope of the territories involved. Personally, I read the book before watching the film and that left me in tears, as Jebreal’s only hope for a future was to leave her beloved homeland. She moved to Italy to go to university there and became a respected broadcaster and journalist.

Yet what makes Miral such an important piece of filmmaking is what it says about Fatah (a faction of the PLO) which may in some way explain what is happening now with Hamas. Don’t ask, watch it.

The film chronicles Hind Husseini's effort to build an orphanage in Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab Israeli War. Husseini is played by the great Hiam Abbass and there are more great actors sprinkled throughout the film, including Vanessa Redgrave and Israeli-Palestinian actor Juliano Mer-Khamis who was gunned down in the West Bank by Palestinian shooters outside the theater he ran to unite both peoples shortly after the film screened at the United Nations. See, it’s a film that keeps on teaching, so please watch it and thank me later.

THE TIME THAT REMAINS by Elia Suleiman

No one makes films like Elia Suleiman. After a rocky start in our interactions, during which Suleiman sternly taught me the meaning of integrity as a film journalist covering the Region, the two of us can now sit down and reason about life. And what insight does this man and master filmmaker presents! In his semi-autobiographical 2009 Cannes title The Time That Remains, he shows the Palestinian struggles of those who live in modern-day Israel, and more specifically Nazareth. Joined by great actors like Saleh Bakri and Ali Suliman, Suleiman also acts in the film, as is his custom.

For those who wish to know what it’s really like to be a Palestinian, particularly for an artist, this is a good start. It is a no-holds barred, no punches saved, inside look into Palestinian Israeli society and the film explains so much, in just a compact 110 minutes. And once you’ve become addicted, as I have, to Suleiman’s great brand of filmmaking, you should also watch his 2019 title It Must Be Heaven, which adds a whole new meaning to the Italian saying my mom has been repeating at me since birth: “tutto il mondo è paese” — meaning “the whole world is really one small village.” We are all the same in the end, made up of flesh and blood, and imperfections. Yes, even the Palestinians.

SALT OF THIS SEA by Annemarie Jacir

Another filmmaker who deserves to be watched, from the start of her career, to her most recent work on an episode of US sitcom Ramy is Annemarie Jacir. She gets both what it feels like to be an outsider looking in but also how returning to our own country — whether we were born there or not — is a loaded enterprise.

In the 2008 title Salt of This Sea, Jacir enrolls the help of a duo of phenomenal actors, Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad and Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, who play a sort of modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, but without the guns and the violence.

Hammad plays Soraya, an American-born Palestinian woman, who heads to Israel-slash-Palestine on a quest to reclaim her family's home and money that was taken during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. She is faced with Israeli security and their infuriating interrogations but also the impossible bureaucracy of Palestinian banks, while also encountering a very young Saleh Bakri, who plays Emad, along the way. Emad is as passive as Soraya is angry but together they embark on a journey of mutual discovery and perhaps reclaiming, finally, what is theirs — dignity for one, heritage for the other.

OMAR by Hany Abu Assad

Hany Abu Assad is another filmmaker who doesn’t mince his message. Known for the 2005 Golden Globe winning film Paradise Now, Abu Assad’s Omar is the kind of film that leaves you breathless. When I watched it in Cannes in 2013, I was so moved by the film I needed a full 12 hours on my own to recover and finally come to terms with it’s ending.

These were some of the first words I could put together once I emerged from my self-imposed exile:

“Omar also left me yearning for a world where I wouldn't form a preconceived opinion of a character based on his nationality, where neighbors would not be separated by walls built by governments and where the young and hopeful wouldn't be penalized for being what makes them perfectly human -- young and hopeful.”

Omar questions identity, is doubts how easily we can realize which side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict someone is on, and it throws everything up in the air, leaving the audience to gather the pieces, as quickly as possibly, to come up with a finale. Abu Assad is another filmmaker who is wonderful as describing both sides in shades of grey, foregoing the black and white, good and bad rhetoric which is so common in this age of social media and unacceptable bias.

RABIN, THE LAST DAY by Amos Gitai

I always like a bit of learning with my entertainment and Amos Gitai’s extensive oeuvre does offer that. In Rabin, the Last Day, the Israeli filmmaker offers a look at the last leader in his homeland who could have actually brought peace to the Region. Alas, it was not to be, as the then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on “November 4, 1995, by Yigal Amir, an extremist Jew, who was opposed to the Oslo Accords and the handing over of control of parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians as a part of a landmark peace agreement,” as The Times of Israel reported. Of course, it’s not hard to make an association with modern day Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Gitai doesn’t shy away from crossing that line in the film.

"Sometimes when you feel like the present is stuck, you have to go back to the past to look for answers for the future." -- Amos Gitai

Just before his murder, Rabin had been working relentlessly on bringing the Palestinians and the Israelis together and Gitai focuses in his film on the hearings of the Shamgar Commission which was headed by Israel's Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar — making what could have been tedious court proceedings into a spellbinding watch.

Ah, and don’t forget that in 1994 Rabin, along with Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were collectively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, marking a time in space which doesn’t seem we will ever see again.

BYE BYE TIBERIAS by Lina Soualem

Last but not least is a title from this current year, fresh from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, in September. The film has increased in gravitas in the last couple of weeks as it helps to explain, without manipulation or much fanfare, the basic situation of the Palestinians. Soualem is the daughter of Hiam Abbass, so both opening and closing this listicle about films to watch in the Region is a bit of an homage to her. Abbass has represented, with great dignity and her wonderfully unique brand of superstar talent, the best of the Palestinian people.

Bye Bye Tiberias is a film which is guaranteed to go on to win more and more prizes, including some of the big ones in the first months of 2024. It is because in its simplicity and minimalism, using home videos and voiceovers, along with a box of photographs which becomes the focus of the second half of Soualem’s exquisite doc, it explains every nook and cranny, every feeling and every intricacy of what being Palestinian means in this day and age. But also what that heritage of pain does to a person, and a people. And perhaps how memories are always biased and the place we left behind always seems better than our present one.

I wrote something a bit longer after watching the film in Venice. I called the film a “personal tribute to a global cause” and stand by that today, after all that has happened.

And that’s all folks. Remember… what you watch, changes you. So make sure it does so for the better, and learn to love a little education with your entertainment too.

All images and trailer sourced from the internet.