30 Films for Palestine 🇵🇸 & Where to Stream Them
As genocide has unfolded in Gaza over the last month our hearts have turned to Palestine, and so we seek any connection we can find. One place to create empathy, and understanding is through the amazing set of films created about Palestine. Over the last few years, the Center for Global Muslim Life has been building a Global Muslim Film streaming database as part of our research project, The State of Global Muslim Film — From Streaming to Local Film Markets. As this crisis has unfolded in Gaza we have decided to put out the films we have collected about Palestine so far that are currently on streaming platforms.
We are looking at streaming as the end of the line for a film life today to help us understand the many gaps in the Muslim filmmaking world from funding, to film festivals and distribution models. As others have made clear the global Muslim film talent is there, but the deep audience development work hasn’t been fully defined and when it has been done it is only at a country level. When TV shows that are globally viewed and loved like Ertugrul cannot be explained without understanding the global diasporic viewing patterns of Muslim communities. Of course, streaming as has been discussed recently by the likes of Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro, can lead to films disappearing since physical versions of most films on VHS or DVD are no longer made. So films can disappear especially if they have a message people don’t want to hear like in the recent film Stand (2022) about Mahmoud Abdul Rauf which was originally distributed on Showtime in the United States but then disappeared a few months after premier and cannot be found online anywhere now even for rent. Which Abdul Rauf and others believe is from pressure from the NBA.
If you have a film you think we should add to the list please tag us @GlobalMuslimLife on Twitter or Instagram or reply to this story below. As we think about building our own economies in this moment focused on Muslim-owned businesses we feature here the set of Muslim streaming services that have emerged over the last few years, Alchemiya, Muslim Kids TV, USHub, Durio+, and most recently Qalbox from Singapore.
In terms of the leading streaming platforms in the world, it is not surprising that Netflix is the leader in terms of Palestinian content because they have made the greatest investment in global audience development across languages around the world. What’s perhaps more surprising is how little Palestinian content is on the rest of the streaming platforms with Disney+ and its subsidiaries with zero films, Warner Brothers Max platform with one of the biggest content libraries with just a few television episodes featuring Palestinians on the entire platform. However, from an overall content analysis, the worst of these platforms is Amazon Prime, when you look at just the content available for free for Prime subscribers there are 2 films about Palestine and there are 9 film and television shows about Israel. This includes an entire television series about the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), called Life by the Sword.