Khadijeh Habashneh, Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Khadijeh Habashneh (KH): The main reason behind writing this book stemmed from a sense of moral responsibility towards a group of young Palestinian filmmakers who dedicated their lives in service to the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation. This group of exceptional and pioneering filmmakers were the first to join an armed national liberation movement from the beginning. They documented their people’ struggle for future generations and to preserve the Palestinian national memory. This book also presents their interactions with their surroundings: the fighters, life within refugee camps, and the people who accompanied the struggle through social, economic, and cultural works and activities. This is the first book that narrates the history of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU).
The second reason for documenting the journey of the PFU is because its history has been forgotten and its leading role during the 1960s and ‘70s has been marginalized. Many people do not know the founders of the Palestinian cinema nor the contributions and the sacrifices they made for their people’s struggle and national memory. Most of the book is narrated through the voices of members of the unit who are still alive, or their close friends and relatives who lived during the early days of the PFU and its development. I have also relied on segments of what members of the PFU have written or said in interviews, and some writings by their contemporaries, in addition to my personal experiences with them.
Ultimately, this book is about preserving Palestinian national memory, which is vital to our national identity.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
KH: The book addresses the personal and practical journeys of the founders of the PFU, who are no longer with us. It highlights their ideas about revolutionary cinema and their belief that cinema and cultural production was a weapon alongside the armed struggle. Even though they were educated and trained in cinema approaches taught in Cairo and London, they were committed to producing their own revolutionary language in cinema that was inspired by the people and for the people. These filmmakers transformed how Palestinians viewed themselves at the time, shifting their image from helpless and weak refugees to freedom fighters. Whenever a film was screened in a refugee camp, most people attended the screening, and many were excited to see their young sons and daughters featured in these films. They became the stars that they liked to see, rather than the usual film stars they were accustomed to seeing in Arab and world cinema. To these filmmakers, cinema was an important medium to reach large segments of society irrespective of class, educational background, and age.
Another important aspect of the book is its exploration of the role the PFU played in documenting the role of the revolution among Palestinian people, and its interactions with Palestinian and Arab people. They also documented the relations and interactions of the PLO with other liberation movements, progressive parties, and solidarity movements and groups. They documented the battles they faced with their people from Israeli aggressions, including air raids and bombardment on different refugee camps, and the near genocide of Nabatiyyeh, the Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon. They presented, for the first time to the world, the image and the real narration of the Palestinian people’s cause and their struggle.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
KH: The defeat of the 1967 war was a big shock, not only to me, but to my entire generation. Soon after, when I was starting my career as a clinical psychologist, the armed Palestinian liberation movement, which had been underground, was launched. I realized at that moment that the individual work I was doing was not enough to change the reality from which I was suffering, and I felt the need to join a collective effort for change and liberation with the Palestinian revolution. I believed it was a hopeful path to create social change and to struggle against the Israeli occupation, in order to liberate our land. Thus I became part of the political movement. I focused on mobilizing and organizing women, because I believe that the right place to create social change is with women. I volunteered at the PFU, and later produced films. In parallel, I was researching, documenting, and analyzing the context of which I was part. In 1973, I wrote the first study of a group of Palestinian women who participated in the revolution in the early period of 1967-1971 and kept publishing research on the changing role of women in society and in the struggle. I see writing and documenting the experience of the PFU as a continuation of my commitment to making the Palestinian experience accessible to the masses and to future generations.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
KH: Well, I would like everyone to read the history of the PFU! But especially filmmakers, scholars, and students. The PFU’s journey is a valuable lesson that would be beneficial for current and future generations who continue to fight for Palestinian liberation and who believe in the importance of cinema in anti-colonial struggles and movements.
I would like this memoir to introduce readers to the films that were produced by the pioneer filmmakers and to encourage them to keep their memories alive.
As a filmmaker who is also trained in psychology, I believe that cinema is a powerful medium for most people of different ages and educational levels, even as a medium to literate people. It awakens and enhances human imaginary and visual thinking, which is central to our people’s struggle for dignity and freedom.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
KH: With the ongoing Israel-US genocide in Gaza, there is a great interest in and many requests to screen the films that were produced by the Palestinian revolutionary cinema, the films that narrate the actual story of Palestinian people and their struggle. I have spent a good part of my life making the effort to collect copies of films whose originals were lost with the Palestinian Cinema Archive after the withdrawal of PLO forces from Lebanon in 1982. These are the films produced by the PFU which developed and expanded in the middle of the 1970s into what became known as the Palestinian Cinema Institution (PCI). So, I am currently providing these films to film festivals and solidarity events, with Gaza and Palestinian people, worldwide. In addition, I have had a lot of requests from filmmakers, students, and scholars who are interested in screening the films and having conversations about them.
In the near future, I plan to return to writing my autobiography, which I started writing a few years ago. Given that I accompanied the Palestinian revolution since its inception in the late 1960s, I believe it is my duty to write about my journey and make it available to my people and future generations. I hope they will find in it experiences and perhaps lessons relevant to their personal lives that encourages them to continue on the path for national struggle and liberation.
J: What would you say have been your main achievements to date?
KH: To answer such a question, I can say I am satisfied that I could live according to my beliefs, living and feeling myself alongside the man I loved. I was able to practice and write down some of my thoughts and beliefs. Yes, we gained some victories through our work and with our people’s struggle. We even felt happy during battles, which I hope will lead to a forward step for Palestinian freedom. I worked hard to achieve some balance between the needs of work and the needs of family.
Looking at the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, I can say that the Palestinian cause has endured a very long time and is taking an eternity. At the moment, I am in my late 70s, and it seems that people like me who are working for peace and justice for the Palestinian people need two or more lives.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 8, “The Search for the Lost Films of the Palestinian Cinema Institution”)
In the summer of 2015, while I was searching for the films of the Palestinian Cinema Institution (PCI), I received a phone call from the militant Daoud Barakat who had worked as the head of the PLO Office in Geneva during the 1970s and 1980s. He insisted on getting in touch after learning about my efforts to search for and collect the lost films of the PCI, suggesting that he had information that would be useful for the search. When we met, he informed me that during one of his visits to Beirut at the end of 1981 or the beginning of 1982, he had received a call from Mustafa who inquired about the possibility of leaving several films of the PCI for safekeeping in the Swiss Cinema Archive that had recently been established in Switzerland. And as it so happens, Daoud added that he had returned to Geneva with fifteen films from the PCI, which he deposited at the cinematheque in Switzerland. Daoud and I started reviewing the names, phone numbers, and addresses of friends and comrades who were living in Switzerland at the time, looking for ways to initiate a search for the films. I contacted the administration of the Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne, which was under renovation, and we were delayed for some time because of this. The process of the search lasted nearly two years, as we were able, through communication with the administration of the cinematheque in Lausanne, to recover only four of the original fifteen films. I think the cinematheque was unable to locate the films because of the difficulty in identifying an accurate date when the films were deposited, and the titles under which they were labeled, in addition to being poorly organized since its beginnings in the early 1980s. I didn’t ask for copies of the films the cinematheque claimed to have found, because I already had copies of them. This issue requires further follow-up.
The journey in search of the films was a difficult one, and it consumed about a decade of effort. During that time, I was the planning and execution manager, and the secretary who typed and responded to letters. I carried the film reels that arrived through the Palestinian embassies and looked for a 16 mm projector or 16 mm editing machine (Moviola) to watch the films, check their contents, and assess the degree of damage that had accumulated over time and in the absence of proper preservation conditions. Currently it is very difficult to find 16 mm machines because everything is digital, especially in Jordan where there is no cinema industry. Although filmmaking began there before the start of the television industry, it was stopped in the beginning of the 1970s. It took a long time before I discovered that the Jordanian Television had repaired an old editing machine, as a means to search for some old films. I collaborated with them by coordinating the search with the Palestinian embassy in Jordan. Unfortunately, we were obliged to move the films to Cairo to continue watching and cleaning the films.
At the end of 2018, in an old office of Fatah in Cairo, I accidently found two film reels, and what I suspect is Newsreel No. 3 and a copy of the film The Key, which I hope is in Arabic. I have many copies of the film prepared in different languages, such as French, German, and Spanish. I have not yet seen the reels because they were discovered the day before I left. They are kept under paid custody, alongside a Palestinian (Arabic) copy of the film Tal Al-Za‘atar at the Cinema Company (formerly the Sound, Light and Cinema company) that is now affiliated with the National Cinema Institute in the area of Al-Haram [in Giza].
Most of the films that were produced nearly forty years ago were found buried in storage or forgotten cellars amidst dust and rust. At the end, we were able to find 80 percent of the films whose negatives were lost with the archive. And the journey in search of funding to restore the films ensued. A number of successive ministers of culture were contacted, and every national Palestinian organization and institute related to culture was contacted to contribute funding. All of them, however, have budgets limited for their own programs.
A few films have been digitized, restored, and translated through personal initiatives because they were in demand at forums and festivals of Palestinian films around the world. The film They Do Not Exist and Newsreel No.1 were digitized and color-corrected through support from the Palestine National Fund in 2014. With Soul, With Blood and Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza were digitized and restored in collaboration with the French Cinematheque.
Some films were never missing. Palestine in the Eye was found with Hani Jawharieh’s family. Palestinian Visions and Children Without Childhood were with their directors, Adnan Madanat, and myself, respectively. After participating in the Moscow Film Festival in July 1981, Madanat and I arrived in Beirut right after the Israeli air raids on Al Fakahani, when the PCI was thinking of moving the archive to a safer place. This is the only reason why our films were spared.
In mid-2013, I started to hear whispers of news from the Israeli art historian Rona Sela, who suggested that there is a strong possibility the lost Palestinian Cinema Institution archive is housed in the Israeli Army Archive, which was inaccessible to researchers and historians unlike other archives in Israel. I had also heard this from the Israeli director Eyal Sivan when I participated in the London Palestine Film Festival in 2007. Sela made a film in 2017 entitled Looted and Hidden, and an extensive article about the topic by Israeli writer Ofer Aderet was published in Haaretz newspaper under the title “Why Are Countless Palestinian Photos and Films Buried in Israeli Archives?” on July 1, 2017. Then, Sela published a book about the Israeli Army’s theft of everything related to Palestinian cultural and political heritage, entitled Made Public, especially after she found and conducted an interview with one of the soldiers who helped transport the archives of the PLO Office in Beirut in 1982.
The investigation and search for the missing archive is ongoing until further notice.