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Moved by the unfair, severe and extended plight of the Palestinian people, I try to support their cause in whatever ways possible. But as a retired, colored woman, without fame or fortune or power, with only heart, I often feel there is little I can do in the face of this tragic situation. I can keep abreast of the news. I can donate to organizations working on the ground. I can march in the street with fellow sympathizers. And I can watch Palestinian movies and documentaries. What began as an act of support has turned into the privilege of seeing some truly outstanding films.

Palestinian films are no doubt difficult to make and hard to come by. As one can imagine, they don’t have big budgets. Instead, their richness lies in the simple, moving, real stories of the daily challenging lives of ordinary Palestinians. Despite their quiet presentation, their impact on the world stage is growing louder.

The first one I saw was Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis’s The Lemon Tree. This 2008 film portrays the true story of a Palestinian widow’s legal and emotional struggle when her lemon grove is threatened by the security concerns of her neighbor — the then Israeli defense minister. The film won awards in Europe and Australia.

British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi’s The Present (2020) follows a Palestinian father and daughter as they navigate West Bank checkpoints to buy an anniversary gift, showing quiet resilience under occupation. The film won many awards — including the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Short Film.

Another film by Nabulsi, The Teacher (2023), depicts a Palestinian schoolteacher struggling to balance his commitment to political resistance, his role as a father figure to his students and his newly forming relationship with a volunteer worker. The film won a long list of awards (best film, best actor, audience award, best music) at a variety of film festivals (including Belgrade, Brooklyn, Red Sea, Galway, Trondheim and San Francisco).

Happy Holidays (2024), written and directed by Israeli-Palestinian Scandar Copti, follows interconnected Palestinian families whose secrets and strained relationships surface during the festive season, revealing tensions around love, duty and societal expectations. The film won awards in Hamburg, Marrakech, Thessaloniki, Tromso and Venice.

The year 2024 also delivered a brilliant documentary — No Other Land, the directorial debut of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — that shows the destruction of a Palestinian community in the West Bank, alongside the development of an alliance between a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist. Despite winning a long string of accolades at numerous film festivals (including Berlin, Chicago, Asia Pacific, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington, DC, Los Angeles and London) and even the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, it had difficulty finding a US distributor.

This past year has gifted us three amazing works. This, in spite of the ongoing Israeli killings in Gaza and violence in the West Bank — or perhaps because of.