So They Know We Existed
Genres
Overview
When she heard the explosions around her, 15-year-old Sma Ahel immediately picked up her phone. 'I removed the password from my phone so that if we didn't make it out, and we were killed, people would know what happened to us. So they know we existed.' In their own words and images, this short documentary tells the story of a Palestinians trapped in deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas during an 11-day war in May 2021.
Details
Budget
$0
Revenue
$0
Runtime
14 min
Release Date
2021-07-14
Status
Released
Original Language
Arabic
Vote Count
0
Vote Average
0
Sma Ahel
Sma Ahel (Herself)
0.0
Detained
Najwa, Nawal, and Siham, three Palestinian widows, live with their 11 children in a house on Shuhada Street in Hebron. Their house lies on the border; the façade is under Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority controls the back. At the entrance to the house is a military post; on the roof the Israeli army has placed a watch point over Palestinian Hebron. The three women, trapped in the middle and constantly surrounded by Israeli soldiers, carry on their difficult lives in a perverse situation: the occupation becomes a routine, the absurd becomes a given. This is the story of an occupation that extends to the staircase and the roof of the house, where it encounters poverty, loneliness, pain, but also the small joys of everyday life. This is an internal prison, the external one is the ongoing occupation.
2001-02-22 | he
0.0
3 cm Less
3 CM LESS (the title comes from projections that the Palestinian children of today will grow up on average three centimeters shorter than their parents, thanks to the deprivations of occupation) is a complex, highly personal look at the impact decades of war has wreaked on families and friendships.
2003-01-01 | ar
0.0
Guy Hircefeld: A Guy with a Camera
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.
2018-09-27 | en
5.6
West of the Jordan River
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.
2018-03-15 | en
6.1
The Judge
A verité legal drama about Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari'a court in the Middle East, whose career provides rare insights into both Islamic law and gendered justice.
2017-09-10 | en
8.5
La bataille de Jérusalem
This documentary, filmed after October 7, places recent events in context and retraces the extraordinary history of this region to shed light on the present, interviewing actors and witnesses to this conflict: Islamists, Jewish nationalists, imams, rabbis, intellectuals, urban planners, soldiers, etc.
2023-12-12 | fr
9.5
The way back home
The film examines a personal attempt to address existential concepts related to Palestinians such as exile, return and the image of the homeland.
| en
6.5
Here and Elsewhere
Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.
1976-09-15 | fr
7.5
Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege
During the Syrian civil war, the district of Yarmouk, home to thousands of Palestinians, became the scene of dramatic and ferocious fighting. Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege) is a film that follows the destiny of civilians during the brutal sieges, imposed by the Syrian regime, that took place in the wake of the battles. With his camera, Abdallah Al-Khatib composes a love song to a place that proudly resists the atrocities of war.
2021-05-01 | ar
7.7
Waltz with Bashir
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
2008-06-12 | he
0.0
Echoes of a Lost Gaza
Mariam Shahin has been making films about Gaza for over thirty years. When she moved to Gaza in 2005, she felt a powerful sense of optimism following the Israeli withdrawal. But by 2009, war had badly damaged its infrastructure, neighbourhoods, businesses and communities – and that optimism had evaporated. Now, in the wake of the even more destructive war that began on 7th October 2023, Mariam seeks out the people she has met in Gaza over the years – and reflects on the wasted potential and devastated lives after sixteen years of blockade and a year of one of the most destructive wars in Middle East history.
2024-10-27 | en
7.5
War Photographer
Documentary about war photographer James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever.
2001-11-01 | en
7.0
Where Should the Birds Fly?
The film tells the compelling and moving stories of two remarkable young women living in Gaza and the struggle of Gazans trying to maintain their humanity and humor while hoping to find some sense of normality in a world that is anything but normal.
2013-06-21 | ar
0.0
1913: Seeds of Conflict
Explore an overlooked moment in pre-WWI Palestine when people's identities overlapped, and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities intermingled freely. Few could contemplate the conflict that would engulf their region for the next century.
2015-02-15 | en
0.0
Intifada: Road to Freedom
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.
1988-01-01 | ar
0.0
500 Dunam on the Moon
Ayn Hawd is a Palestinian village that was captured and depopulated by Israeli forces in the 1948 war. In 1953 Marcel Janco, a Romanian painter and a founder of the Dada movement, helped transform the village into a Jewish artists' colony, and renamed it Ein Hod. This documentary tells the story of the village's original inhabitants, who, after expulsion, settled only 1.5 kilometers away in the outlying hills. This new Ayn Hawd cannot be found on official maps, as Israeli law doesn't recognize it, and its residents, deemed "present absentees" by the authorities, do not receive basic services such as water, electricity or an access road. Rachel Leah Jones' filmmaking debut is a critical look at the art of dispossession and the creativity of the dispossessed.
2002-01-01 | en
0.0
Something from there
Something from there is a short film on the substance of our original lands. Weaving between the voices of the artist’s parents, one a refugee and the other not, the film is personal, yet evokes a shared Palestinian experience.
2020-09-01 | en
0.0
Palestine: Story of a Land
Using only rare archival and newsreel footage, this film tells the story of Palestine from the nineteenth century through current times.
1993-01-01 | fr
0.0
Closeness to the Land
In 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, Gazala purchased land in western Ohio, on which sits a disused school building. This site allowed her to explore her complex relationship with “the land.” As the daughter of displaced indigenous Palestinians, she attempts to form a proxy bond with the earth, on ground that was stolen from the displaced indigenous Shawnee people. Closeness to the Land is video footage of hand-painted text signs that translate the word الأرض (ard) into six English words, displayed performatively in multiple locations to capture the now-invisible nature of indigenous culture in Ohio. These signs were installed on the old schoolhouse in early 2021.
2022-05-21 | en
7.7
Tantura
When, in the late 1990s, Israeli student Teddy Katz exposed the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in the village of Tantura, in May 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, he was initially praised for his pioneering work; but he was soon infamous and branded a traitor. Decades later, incendiary new evidence emerges that corroborates Teddy's findings.
2022-01-20 | he