Culture & Arts
US distributors keep award-winning Palestinian films off cinema screens
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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"No Other Land" won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March 2025 without a distributor in the United States.
The Washington Post reported after the ceremony that the film — made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor — was the highest-grossing of the nominated documentaries and still had no US distribution deal, and quoted one of the filmmakers saying that distributors' reluctance was "completely political."
It reached screens anyway by self-distributing. IndieWire reported the film opened at New York's Film Forum on 31 January 2025, a week after Oscar nominations were announced, and took roughly $26,000 in its first week before expanding.
The pattern repeated later that year. NBC News reported in October 2025 that "The Voice of Hind Rajab," which lists Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara among its executive producers, received a standing ovation of nearly 23 minutes at its Venice premiere in September and that films about Palestinians were meeting a divided Hollywood.
The International Documentary Association published its own analysis, arguing that industry economics and politics together were suppressing documentaries sympathetic to Palestinians.
Not every film met that wall. Kino Lorber announced it had acquired North American rights to "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk," Sepideh Farsi's documentary built from video calls with the Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona, after its premiere in the ACID section at Cannes in 2025; Variety reported that the sales agent Cercamon held worldwide rights and later closed a series of territory sales.
Hassona was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 16 April 2025 along with ten members of her family, one day after the film's Cannes selection was announced, according to an open letter signed by nearly 400 film industry figures that paid tribute to her. She was 25.
On the money side, the infrastructure is new and thin. The Palestine Film Institute, founded in 2019, launched a Palestine Film Fund in May 2025, according to the institute's own account; IDFA reported that the first call for applications would open in September 2025 with selections announced in November.
The institute says the fund supports Palestinian filmmakers worldwide regardless of where they live or what passport they carry, and works with local, regional and international partners.
Where that money comes from is largely Gulf and diaspora. The institute lists the Palestine Pavilion at the 2025 Cannes market as organised with support from the Masharawi Fund, the Doha Film Institute, Watermelon Pictures, the 2048 Foundation and Hikmat Palestine.
Pledged money has also disappeared. France 24 reported from Cannes in May 2025 that the producer of "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" said he struggled to finance the film after the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023, because several partners, including some Arab countries, withdrew funds they had promised.
Gaza itself has had no commercial cinema to show any of this.
The Arabic daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported that the Strip has been without cinemas since the end of 1987, when the first intifada began, after a run of halls dating to the 1940s — al-Khadra, then al-Samer, then al-Jalaa in the early 1950s and al-Nasr.
An account published by Literary Hub says the number of cinemas in Gaza reached ten during the 1970s, that some closed after 1967 because they depended on Egyptian films that Israel prohibited, and that films thereafter came from Israel.
The closures that followed had more than one author. Al Jazeera reported in 2019 that the Palestinian Authority reopened the al-Nasr cinema in 1994 and that members of Islamist movements burned it a year later, along with al-Jalaa, arguing the films shown were religiously forbidden. AFP reported in 2023 that the building that housed al-Samer had become a car dealership.
Production continued without theatres. The Masharawi Fund for Films and Filmmakers in Gaza produced "From Ground Zero," a set of 22 shorts by Gaza filmmakers, according to Hyphen, which reported on the project in September 2025.
Festivals have absorbed pressure from several directions at once. Deadline reported in November 2024 that a Berlin city website described "No Other Land" as containing "antisemitic tendencies," and that the Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle publicly backed the filmmakers and rejected the claim that their award-ceremony speeches were antisemitic. Progressive.org reported that Germany's culture minister Claudia Roth, who had applauded at the premiere, later called the film "shockingly one-sided."
Pressure has also come from the other side. Haaretz reported in December 2024 that the Brussels festival Cinemamed pulled a screening of "Belle from Gaza" after activist groups said the documentary contributed to pinkwashing.
In September 2025, a pledge organised by Filmmakers for Palestine committed signatories not to work with Israeli film institutions the organisers called complicit in abuses against Palestinians.
Signature counts differ by outlet and date: NPR reported more than 2,000 on 9 September, Hyperallergic more than 3,500, and Snopes verified the text named a boycott of institutions rather than individuals. A counter-letter, reported by The A.V. Club, argued that Israeli film institutions are not government bodies and are often the government's loudest critics.
Israel's own public film funding is now in question. Israel Hayom reported on 21 December 2025 that culture minister Miki Zohar announced he would move to repeal the Cinema Law, which Haaretz noted was passed by the Knesset in 1999 and currently underwrites the sector with 130 million shekels a year.
Israel Hayom reported the 2025 allocation stood at 100 million shekels and that the minister had ordered a half-year funding call capped at 40 million, with decisions on 2026 left until a review committee reports.
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