This article analyzes three recently produced documentaries that critically contemplate accepted Israeli self-perceptions, The Flat (2011), Blood Relation (2009), and Fragments (2011). The different themes of these films notwithstanding, they share a similar narrative structure and key visual metaphors in order to probe the boundaries of Zionist identity in a similar way. The films’ use of place – and transitions in-between places – as indication for identity crisis appropriates familiar Zionist clichés and undermines the ideological premises they propagate. While genuinely expressing critical voices, however, these films also display the evaporation of criticism from the Israeli identity discourse. By the end of these films, protest transforms into a melancholic nostalgia, which leads the filmmakers both to oppose existing norms and to abstain from offering alternatives for them.

This article deals with the appearance of an independent stream of Palestinian documentary cinema, during the 1990’s, and its specific characteristics. This it does through concentrating on three films: A Chronicle of Disappearance (Suleiman, 1996) Ustura (Hassan, 1998) and 1948 (Bakri, 1998). The argument is supported by a number of theoretical anchorages – examination of early cinema as a Lacanian mirror of self and other, the use of Ethnotopia, a concept used by Nichols and Russell, and the Freudian use of mourning and melancholia in order to deal with personal, social and national loss, as well as an examination of narrative methods and narrativity in the three films. In all three films one element appears to rise and focus our interest – story, storytelling, and narration – the narrative processes appear crucial to films which work within the documentary tradition, but also hover over the boundary with narrative cinema. This central characteristic, separating them distinctly from the mainstream of documentary film in Israel, also connects them with other strains of documentary, and specifically with Third World cinema and Arab cinema. On this basis, the article locates the role of storytelling as a structure of identity, evidence and memory, after a long period during which this memory was repressed by the Israeli occupation and its atrocities. It seems that this memory produced in the films is capable of displacing and neutralizing some of the power of the processes of melancholia which typify the loss referred to, and may herald a new form of cinema, as well as a new form of discourse within the Israeli and Palestinian areans.

Film production has for a long time been a prominent medium for Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation and create a cultural memory. Though there are some academic studies on the subject, a critical framework of analysis for such films remains underdeveloped. This article argues that Palestinian film production has surged particularly in recent years as part of an increasingly globalised dimension to Palestinian resistance, alongside such initiatives as the Electronic Intifada and the BDS movement.

The 1993 Oslo Accords marked a new phase in the globalization of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. The Accords, in combination with the Paris Economic Protocol of 1994, established a political-economic framework that enabled the integration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt1 ) into the increasingly neoliberal global economy. These agreements have facilitated the Israeli imposition of a discursive apparatus upon oPt that has been used to establish, legitimize, and maintain control over oPt while enabling the integration of inexpensive Palestinian labor within the Israeli economy. This discursive apparatus has also profoundly affected the articulation of Palestinian place and subjectivity. The realities brought about by this discursive apparatus are literally embodied in the material-spatial organization of oPt and the daily lives of Palestinians as they move amongst the various locales that comprise the Palestinian place. Palestinian filmmakers Hani Abu Asaad, Rima Eissa, Michel Khleifi, Rasheed Mashharawi, and Elia Slieman have confronted these realities in what we describe as a nomadic quest to fund, produce, and screen their films. These filmmakers have gained international recognition as important witnesses and chroniclers of the nature and effects of the Israeli discursive apparatus, which also enjoys a level of international recognition, while the films selected for discussion in this chapter have all received international critical appreciation.

In this article, Palestinian national cinema is interpreted through the lens of a ‘structure of feeling’ in order to address the theme of Palestinians reconstituting themselves in relation to changing geographies. Palestinians must constantly negotiate the tensions between mobility and immobility, whether in exile or diaspora, inside Israel, or within the Territories. Connecting these lived geographies to film, the article argues that analytic frameworks mistaking the national for a territorially-defined and stable order are ill-suited for a treatment of Palestinian national cinema. Touching on film production, narrative tropes and filmic locations in various films, the paper argues that cinema serves as a space to transgress Palestine’s territorial trap. Cinema as a structure of feeling allows for a more elastic, transgressive and encompassing understanding of Palestine and Palestinians.