Hyde Park Picture House hosts a groundbreaking day exploring the lost cinema of the Palestine Film Unit.

Archival clips unseen for nearly 50 years will be screened in Leeds on Saturday, 18th October, as Hyde Park Picture House presents “Militant Palestinian Cinema… In a Day” – a unique opportunity to witness rarely-seen works from the reconstituted archives of the Palestine Film Unit.

The full-day event will showcase restored clips from films made in the 1970s and early 1980s some that have been painstakingly recovered and digitised after decades of fragmentation, exile, and near-loss. Many of these works have not been publicly screened since their original underground showings during the height of the Palestinian liberation movement.

Saeed Taji Farouky, the Palestinian-Egyptian-British filmmaker hosting the event said: “These films were made under extraordinary circumstances – often smuggled across borders, screened in secret, and deliberately suppressed. That they survived at all is remarkable. That we can now see them is nothing short of miraculous.”

The day school, part of Hyde Park Picture House’s acclaimed Hyde Park Film School series, will explore three key themes:

• The Origins of Militant Palestinian Cinema – examining how Palestinian filmmakers pioneered radical documentary techniques
• International Solidarity and Art Films – investigating the global Third Cinema movement
• New Approaches to Militant Cinema – discussing how contemporary filmmakers are reviving these traditions

The archival clips represent a crucial but overlooked chapter in cinema history.

Created by the Palestine Film Unit – a collective of filmmakers working within the Palestinian liberation movement – these militant films were instruments of revolution rather than passive observation. 

The filmmakers understood themselves as combatants armed with cameras, actively participating in the struggle through their depictions of life in refugee camps, resistance activities, and the daily realities of occupation at a time when Palestinian narratives were almost absent from global media.

Wendy Cook, Head of Cinema at Hyde Park Picture House, said: “Cinema is too vast for any single venue to encompass entirely, so we’re privileged to work with specialists like Leeds Palestinian Film Festival who help bring these vital, underseen stories to light. These aren’t just historical artefacts – they’re living documents that speak directly to today.”

The restoration and digitisation of some of these films has been a collaborative effort involving archivists, film preservation experts, and Palestinian cultural institutions working to recover materials scattered across multiple countries during decades of displacement.

Farouky, whose documentary A Thousand Fires won the Marco Zucchi Award at Locarno Film Festival 2021, brings both scholarly rigour and lived experience to the day. As an educator and lead tutor of London’s Radical Film School, he has dedicated his career to amplifying marginalised voices in cinema.

Farouky explains: “What’s striking about these films is how innovative they were. Palestinian filmmakers were experimenting with form and technique in ways that influenced documentary cinema globally – yet their work has been systematically erased from film history. This day is about reclaiming that legacy.”

The event concludes with an evening screening of full-length documentary Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege (2021), Abdallah Al-Khatib’s haunting documentary about life in the Yarmouk refugee camp during the Syrian civil war – demonstrating the continued relevance of militant cinema traditions.

The day school is supported by Leeds Palestinian Film Festival and funded by Film Hub North, enabling reduced ticket prices for wider accessibility.