The Best of Palestinian Cinema at the 2025 Amman Film Festival

Built across twelve hills and shaped by its uneven topography, Amman isn’t quite a metropolis, but a city in flux. Roman ruins stand beside concrete high-rises; traffic is a fact of life. Camps like Baqa’a and Marka, originally established after the 1967 war to shelter Palestinians displaced by the Israeli occupation, have evolved into semi-urbanized, densely populated enclaves. Just beyond them, Amman’s rapidly gentrifying districts hum with diplomats and NGO expats sipping cold brew in glass-walled cafés. Here, proximity to Palestine is not just geographic – it’s generational, emotional, intimate. Over 60 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian descent, and the realities of occupation and displacement linger beneath the surface of daily life. There is quiet in Amman, but it carries an undertow.

The Amman International Film Festival reflects this paradox. Launched in 2020 with royal backing and regional ambitions, the festival aims to position Jordan as a cinematic hub – hosting red carpets, industry panels and platforms promoting the country as a prime location for international film productions. But even in this polished, state-sponsored setting, politics seep through. The festival opened with an exclusive, closed-door opening ceremony, introduced by a moment of silence “for the Palestinian victims”. Yet what followed felt far from symbolic. Screenings were public, affordable and unfolded across the city: from rooftop terraces to indie cinemas and multi-screen malls. Palestinian cinema wasn’t simply included; it formed the emotional backbone of the week. These films didn’t just recount struggle; they confronted memory, estrangement and endurance with clarity and cinematic intelligence. In a world constantly pushing its crises off-screen, these stories insist on staying visible. 

Below is a selection of standout Palestinian films screened this year – soon to travel further, and not to be missed.

To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024)

Mahdi Fleifel’s debut narrative feature opens with a line from Edward Said: “In a way, it’s sort of the fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away”. Shot in a muted and observational style, the film follows two undocumented friends adrift in contemporary Athens, surviving through petty scams, addiction and a scrap of loyalty. The Danish-Palestinian director – previously known for A World Not Ours and a string of acclaimed political shorts – turns here to fiction with piercing realism and emotional restraint.

Premiered at Cannes 2024, comparisons have been drawn to Bicycle Thieves and Midnight Cowboy, but the film also channels the grit and despair of La Haine in its portrayal of friendship under pressure and systemic neglect. Characters you grow attached to disappear; hope turns to urgency, then to resignation. The final sequence lands with an understated violence that feels almost inevitable. Set far from Palestine, To A Land Unknown suggests that exile is not defined by geography – but by its very absence.

Aisha’s Story (Elizabeth Vibert, 2025)

One of the festival’s quiet revelations, Aisha’s Story centers on Aisha Azzam, a 70-years-old Palestinian woman running a communal grain mill in Baqa’a camp. The second documentary by Canadian historian and filmmaker Vibert, it’s a grounded, clear-eyed portrait told with striking simplicity. No dramatic cues needed – just Aisha, her voice and her gestures. Food becomes a language of continuity, a way to carry memory through the everyday. As she prepares traditional Palestinian recipes – maqloubeh, zaatar, maftoul, knafeh – we’re drawn into a space where heritage is preserved not in archives, but in action. Aisha’s family was displaced twice – first during the Nakba, then again from the West Bank in 1967 – and now, together with her family, she holds a place where wheat, spices and memory are ground into one.

She is a remarkable protagonist: wise and quietly magnetic. Seeing her at the premiere – moved, surrounded by her children and grandchildren – was one of the festival’s most beautiful and powerful moments. Her presence is a reminder that resistance isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it lives in kitchens, in rituals of care, passed from hand to hand, generation to generation.

A fundraising initiative launched by director Vibert now allows direct support for Aisha and her mill – more details can be found here.

Thank you for Banking with Us (Laila Abbas, 2024)

Palestinian director Laila Abbas brings tonal range and satirical clarity to her fiction debut: a sharp, dark comedy of manners set in Ramallah, where two sisters navigate the chaotic legacy of their late father – and the bureaucratic, familial fallout that follows. Inheritance papers, buried secrets, simmering feuds and long-held resentments pile up with absurd precision. Themes like gender roles, generational tension and divorce are handled with disarming humour and a refusal to reduce.

Visually restrained but tightly paced, the film balances irony with emotional depth – its sharp tone never tipping into caricature. The occupation lingers in the background – as interruption, as atmosphere – but never as spectacle. The two lead actresses carry the film with wit and nuance, in a script that’s dialogue-rich but never heavy-handed. Thank You for Banking With Us feels made for streaming: accessible, intelligent and attentive to the textural realities of Ramallah life, beyond the usual headlines.

UNRWA: 75 ans d’une histoire provisoire (Lyana Saleh, Nicolas Wadimoff, 2025)

Not strictly a Palestinian film, but one that tells a key chapter of recent Palestinian history. This Swiss-produced documentary offers a portrait of UNRWA – the UN agency established for Palestinian refugees, a rare and now deeply contested institution within the international system.

Structured as a dense archival essay, the film traces 75 years of fraught history – from its post-Nakba inception to today’s efforts at delegitimization.

Through layered editing, restored footage and interviews with key figures – most notably historian Ilan Pappé, though not alone – it explores UNRWA’s paradoxical role: providing humanitarian relief while being denied political recognition. At times, a few dissonant voices momentarily disrupt the film’s rhythm – their incongruity ultimately lending weight to the story, rather than undermining it. Formally rigorous and historically grounded, the film is not only a reminder of what UNRWA has represented since 1949, but of what it’s still made to carry.

From Ground Zero+ (2025)

Arguably the most urgent project of the festival – and one of the most impactful in recent memory. You may have heard of From Ground Zero earlier this year, when it was submitted for Oscar consideration in the Best International Feature category (though it ultimately didn’t make the shortlist). An anthology of 22 short films – spanning fiction, documentary, animation – directed by young Palestinian filmmakers under the guidance of Gaza-born director Rashid Masharawi, the project documents the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Premiering in its extended version at the Amman Film Festival, From Ground Zero+ adds four new short films, shot in early 2025 as a continuation and urgent update. These films are not just testimonies, but formal responses to catastrophe – fragments of memory and refusal to surrender to silence. If the industry calls it “cinéma du reél“, there’s nothing abstract about it: this is direct, necessary filmmaking.

Through four distinct stories, these new works explore life under extreme conditions: Very Small Dreams (directed by I’timad Wishah) addresses the hidden toll of displacement on women: menstrual health in overcrowded shelters, the risk of infection, the total absence of privacy and intimacy; Hassan (Muhammad Al Sharif) follows an 18-year-old forced to evacuate south while his family remained in the north, tracing a painful journey marked by longing, exhaustion and a flicker of hope. Its final scene is impossible to forget. The Wish (Aws Al Banna) centres on a theatre workshop for young girls, where performance becomes both refuge and confrontation. And Colors Under the Sky (Reema Mahmoud) tells of a young singer determined to keep her voice alive amid collapse. Beyond the shared trauma, a common thread runs through the films: the omnipresent hum of drones, still ringing in the mind long after the credits roll – and the setting itself, Gaza’s devastated Ground Zero, where destruction coexists with the stubborn will to endure. This is what cinema can do: keep stories present, hold space for grief and insist on being seen. Even – especially – when the world would rather turn away.

Rashid Masharawi also launched the Masharawi Film Fund, an initiative supporting young Gazan filmmakers through training, funding and creative resources. You can support the fund here.

Camillo Vegezzi is a freelance music writer based in Milan. He has collaborated with various music magazines and is a contributor to the cultural section of Il Manifesto. Read more of Camillo’s writing on Something Curated here.

Header photo: a still from Aisha’s Story — Aisha overlooks the Dead Sea to Palestine, by Chen Wang.