They Do Not Exist (1974)
Mustafa Abu Ali
They Do Not Exist, Mustafa Abu Ali, Palestine, 16mm > digital, 26 min, 1974
In the late 1960s, a group of young Arab women and men devoted to the struggle for Palestinian freedom chose to contribute to the resistance through filmmaking, recording their lives, hopes, and their fight for justice. Working in both fiction and documentary, they strived to tell the stories of Palestine and to create a new kind of cinema. Their films screened across the Arab world and internationally but never in Palestine. None of the filmmakers were allowed into Palestine, or what became known as Israel, let alone their prints.—Annemarie Jacir, The Electronic Intifada
Salvaged from the ruins of Beirut after 1982, They Do Not Exist has only recently been widely available. Conceived as a response to Golda Meir’s infamous statement, “There were no such things as the Palestinians … They did not exist,” and shot under extraordinary conditions, the film covers conditions in Lebanon’s refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. Now recognized as a cornerstone in the development of Palestinian cinema, the film only received its national premiere in 2003, when a group of Palestinian artists “smuggled” the director into a makeshift cinema in his hometown of Jerusalem (into which Israel barred his entry). Abu Ali, who saw his film for the first time in more than 20 years at this clandestine event, noted, “We used to say ‘Art for the Struggle,’ now it’s ‘Struggle for the Art.’” —Palestine Film Foundation
This copy of They Do Not Exist was remastered and provided by No Name Cinema.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with No Name Cinema.
Image credits: all artworks and still images courtesy No Name Cinema © estate of Mustafa Abu Ali. “Portrait of the late Palestinian director Mustafa Abu Ali at a young age” from the Mustafa Abu Ali collection © Palestinian Museum Digital Archive.
About the artist
Mustafa Abu Ali (Palestine) was a filmmaker, cinematographer, and writer born in Maliha, Palestine in 1940. One of the founders of Palestinian cinema, Abu Ali wrote four screenplays and directed more than 30 films, “navigating a course between a populist heroic tradition and a cinema of ideas, reimagining cinema for a country whose film tradition had been, until the 1960s, one of loss and omission” (Sarah Wood). Abu Ali attended the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s before studying cinema at London School of Film Technique (now London Film School), graduating in 1967. In 1970 he assisted Jean-Luc Godard with the production of Ici et ailleurs (1971) in Jordan. He established the Palestinian Cinema Association in Beirut in 1973 (re-established in Ramallah in 2004) and, with Sulafa Jadallah and Hani Jowharieh, he also established the Palestine Film Unit (PFU), which saw its primary task as “documenting the revolution and creating an archive of images of historical documents.” Following the PLO’s move to Lebanon after the events of Black September, the PFU was renamed the Palestine Cinema Institute and became one of the seven departments of the PLO’s Unified Media. Abu Ali headed the department from 1973 to 1975. His films won numerous awards at international film festivals, the last of which was received from the Ismailia Film Festival in 2003. He died in Ramallah in 2009. His contribution to cinema and the cause of freedom is imperishable.