Palestinian Women

Palestinian Women, filmed in 1974 by Jocelyne Saab while she was still a war reporter, was originally intended for broadcast on a national channel of the ORTF (French Broadcasting and Television Office). Designed in a conventional television format, the film was nevertheless deemed too political and censored before it was even completed. It was never aired, never developed into a positive print, and was relegated to the status of a work copy, forgotten in a cupboard—as Mathilde Rouxel recounts in an interview with Thomas Filteau about Jocelyne Saab’s work, La caméra comme une amie (The Camera as a Friend).

This act of sidelining exemplifies the violent irony of a system that claims to give women a voice, yet silences them the moment that voice becomes disruptive. Saab films Palestinian women who are engaged, militant, fighters, students—women who refuse the role of passive victims and dream of a new society. The documentary makes their political and personal struggle visible—within refugee camps, in exile, through colonial and patriarchal oppression. It stands as an antidote to orientalist paternalism.

Today, censorship takes new forms: images are rendered invisible, algorithmically erased, commodified, discredited. Gaza is starving. The liberation of Palestine is not a moral option—it reveals our relationship to justice. If we fail to demand it, then it is not only a people we abandon, but the very idea of humanity.

Chantal Partamian
Filmmaker and archivist