Cinema that takes on the life and times of Palestinians has rarely been celebrated in the West. Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), both by the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, were Oscar nominees for best foreign film, and Paradise Now won a Golden Globe in 2006. Last year, No Other Land (2024)—a brutal, indispensable record of the erasure of Masafer Yatta—took home best documentary at the Academy Awards. “It’s difficult to review No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist film-makers on the destruction of villages in the West Bank, on a formal level,” The Guardian’s reviewer Adrian Horton remarked. “The usual rubric for evaluating non-fiction cinema does not really extend to films whose existence was actively challenged throughout filming, whose makers’ equipment and livelihood were constantly at risk.”Despite the unfavorable conditions under which the film was made, the filmmaking is deft and persuasive verité, mixed with just enough tonal levity and thoughtfully juxtaposed archival to give you a sense of the difficulty of making any sort of life for oneself as your community and those nearby are terrorized and dismantled by state-sanctioned settlers. It took home the Oscar despite not receiving a single distribution offer from a studio, streamer, or mini-major.This year’s international feature category became a battlefield of sorts around what narratives the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is winning to amplify and which ghosts it is unwilling to unearth, as three very different movies about the plight of the Palestinians vied for a spot among the nominees for the first time: Palestinian entry Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, Jordanian entry Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, and Tunisian entry and eventual best foreign film nominee Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. The major distributors refused to touch these films, just as they passed on No Other Land. Yet, on the festival circuit and in their small weeklong runs in L.A. or New York, this trio stood out in an American media environment that has often shunned or silenced Palestinian voices. These films do not just ask for empathy; they each demand an accounting, both for the past and the present.No wonder then that a screening in Jerusalem of Jacir’s Palestine 36 in January was shut down by the city’s police, with Israeli Minister of National Security Avshalom Peled placing a citywide ban on the movie, which was partially filmed there. Widely programmed on the fall festival circuit since a world premiere at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, the movie is a sweeping historical reconstruction of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt against the British Mandate. There is a desperate, almost miraculous tenacity to its very existence; the shoot was to commence in 2023 in the West Bank but moved to Jordan as the geopolitical landscape succumbed to total conflagration, only to return to Palestinian soil in late 2024 after multiple interruptions. It stands now as a singular artifact—the only feature to physically navigate the psychic and material upheavals of the first two years of this ongoing catastrophe. These films do not just ask for empathy; they each demand an accounting, both for the past and the present.The resulting film plays like a corrective to the grand colonial myths of Lawrence of Arabia–style British adventuring and benevolence. Its narrative is anchored by Yousef (Karim Daoud Anaya), a farmer who works in Jerusalem by day and returns to the hills of nearby Al Basma at night. The opening scenes bluntly announce the film’s thesis: At a Mediterranean port, Arab stevedores unload barrels; one, destined for a Jewish importer, splits open like a piñata to reveal rifles. Simultaneously, the British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope (played with velvety hauteur by Jeremy Irons) inaugurates the BBC-like Palestinian Broadcasting Service from a transmitter in Ramallah, murmuring about harmony as Arab and Jewish dignitaries look on. (The station, we are reminded, preferred light Western songs and orientalized discussions of Arab culture to politics.) The juxtaposition is unsubtle: Beneath the civilities, there are guns.Within days, a general strike and tax boycott convulse the country, aimed at halting Jewish settlers who, in the film, erect stockades on property lacking Ottoman-era title. In the first act, they begin to make their presence felt along the margins of the narrative, a nameless other depicted not unlike Native Americans in an early John Ford picture about how the West Was Won. Jacir crosscuts between Jerusalem—where Palestinian men debate how best to respond—and Al Basma, where Yousef’s family has long lived and where a series of radicalizing events takes place. His father is killed by settlers and his younger brother detained by them, for no particular reason.