Palestine Liberation Organization

Ismail Shammout, an artist who is primarily known for his paintings, also served as director of the Cultural Arts Section of the PLO and worked with the organization’s Film Unit in the 1970s. In this short film, Shammout records a solidarity song by the Palestinian Egyptian singer Zeinab Shaath to announce the most urgent call of Palestine. The song and the words of Kamal Nasser that break through the ballad continue to hold striking relevance today. Lyrics by Lalitha Punjabi.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied its capital, Beirut. The film is a rare example of a PLO film made after the PLO’s departure from Beirut. It documents the burned and destroyed cultural and educational centers from which Israelis stole films, photographs, and historical and contemporary manuscripts. It includes interviews with key members of the Palestinian cultural scene such as Mahmoud Darwish and Ismail Shammout and those in charge of cultural and educational centers that were destroyed.

The West-German director Monica Maurer made a number of important films for the PLO. The Israeli airstrikes against Beirut on 17 July 1981 killed 350 people, including a pregnant woman whose baby could be rescued from her torn-up womb. Maurer shows the people’s suffering and pain, their victimhood. She addresses the systemic causes of violence, referring back to the history of their country and formulating arguments for the necessity of a fight for liberation.

In Layaly Badr’s documentary short, Road to Palestine, seven-year-old Layla – who has been badly injured in an air raid – lives in a refugee camp outside Palestine. Layla and her friends describe how they imagine Palestine, despite never having seen it.

This film focuses on an old Palestinian man who is the subject of artist Ismail Shammout’s painting Memories and Fire. The film unravels his memories using archival photographs and Shammout’s own paintings to tell the story of Palestinian experience and resistance. By simply using a montage of visuals and sounds and avoiding narration, Shammout adopts a style that was used by early Soviet filmmakers who wished to communicate across language boundaries, creating a film that offered an non-verbal narrative of the Palestinian cause. The film was screened at a variety of festivals in the former Soviet Union and won a prize at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week for Cinema and Television in 1973. Recently restored and digitized.

One of the many films Monica Maurer made for the PLO.

One of the many films Monica Maurer and Samir Nimer made for the PLO.