Culture & Arts
B'Tselem puts Venice inside the West Bank villages Israel emptied
Image credit: Khirbet a-Taban, Masafer Yatta, 2025 — Palestine Bal via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) · License
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The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem has taken its West Bank documentation into a headset. Raj'in, a 24-minute virtual-reality documentary it co-produced, is screening in competition at Venice Immersive, the extended-reality section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, the organisation said in a post on X on Sunday.
The title means "We shall return". It comes from graffiti that one of the film's protagonists, 'Alya Mleihat, sprayed on her home before she was forced to leave, B'Tselem says on the film's page, and the phrase recurs in a poem she wrote.
Faiz Abu Rmeleh, a Jerusalem-born photojournalist who has worked with B'Tselem, and the documentary filmmaker Keren Manor created the film together. They shot it over three years with 360-degree cameras in more than eleven Palestinian herding communities, and cut in phone and handycam footage filmed by residents and by the protective-presence activists who stay with them.
NowHere Media, the immersive studio of Felix Gaedtke and Gayatri Parameswaran, joined the project as co-producer in the autumn of 2025 and helped sift three years of footage into a narrative. German Films lists Raj'in as a German-Palestinian co-production.
Three families, three stages#
The film follows three protagonists at different points of dispossession, in B'Tselem's description: Jaber 'Ali Dababseh, who stays on his land through repeated attacks and demolitions; 'Alya Mleihat, displaced more than once; and the Hreizat family, who took their own home apart and moved.
A text card in the film states that of the eleven communities the creators filmed, seven have since been entirely destroyed, the critic Luke Buckmaster wrote in The VR Critic on 3 September after seeing it in Venice. He called it "an immensely powerful 360 documentary" and described a pink couch standing amid the rubble of what had been a family home.
There was a point, during this immensely powerful 360 documentary, when I wondered whether I might cry – and whether my tears might mist up the headset.
Luke Buckmaster, The VR Critic, 3 September 2026
Buckmaster met Abu Rmeleh, Manor, Jaber and 'Alya after the screening. The filmmakers told him they hope the work serves as an advocacy tool that reaches the public and policy-makers.
The count behind the film#
B'Tselem's Sunday post carried its ledger. Since October 2023, it said, 65 Palestinian communities have been entirely forcibly displaced and 18 partially, with more than 4,861 people driven from their homes and land, at least 2,315 of them children.
The organisation's own count has already moved past the film's. On 2 September, B'Tselem said Israeli forces demolished all twelve homes of Khirbet a-Taban in Masafer Yatta within hours, leaving twelve families, about 70 people including 28 children, without shelter.
B'Tselem called Khirbet a-Taban the 66th community Israel has emptied since October 2023, and that statement put the displaced at about 4,931 people, including roughly 2,339 children and teenagers, the Middle East Monitor reported.
"The forces did not leave a single home standing," B'Tselem said. Its executive director, Yuli Novak, said Israel was "continuing to erase Palestinian communities at an accelerating pace as part of the ethnic cleansing it is carrying out in the West Bank", and that the international community was standing "idly by".
Israel said the buildings were unauthorised, Al Jazeera's Mosab Shawer reported from the village on 4 September. Masafer Yatta lies in Area C, where Palestinian building permits are almost impossible to obtain, and an Israeli court ruled in 2022 that residents could be removed from land the army had declared a firing zone decades earlier.
Nidal Younis, head of the Masafer Yatta council, told Al Jazeera the demolition had wiped the village "off the face of the earth" and that the residents would not leave. "They see no alternative to this land," he said.
A tenth-anniversary competition#
Venice Immersive is marking its tenth year, and La Biennale describes it as the first competition for extended-reality work at an A-list festival. This year's programme, on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio from 2 to 12 September, presents 68 projects from 26 countries, 30 of them in competition.
Raj'in is one of the 22 world premieres in that competition, according to the festival's announcement and the German Films listing. The jury is presided over by Paul Raphaël, co-founder of Felix & Paul Studios, sitting with Négar Motevalymeidanshah and Kate Voet.
Variety's Leo Barraclough listed Raj'in in July among the section's projects dealing with "pressing social issues", beside two works on the war in Ukraine.
Raj'in is B'Tselem's first virtual-reality production and follows its documentaries Of Land and Bread, which premiered at IDFA in 2019, and The Boy from H2 in 2017. The credits thank the residents who "welcomed us into their homes and entrusted us with their stories during moments of profound uncertainty and fear", and the film was made with financial support from the European Union.
'Alya sprayed her word on a home she had to leave. For eleven days in Venice, it is the title above the door.
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