Israeli and Palestinian Films Are Building Their Own Market

In the space of a single week, the Toronto International Film Festival will premiere an Israeli drama about Oct. 7 — Avi Nesher’s Our Loves and Hosam Abu Dan’s Thirteen in Gaza, a portrait of a father and his teenage daughter navigating life as refugees, shot entirely in Gaza during the ongoing war. Both screenings are sold out. Both will likely struggle to find a U.S. buyer. (Gersh and Other Angle Pictures are handling sales on Our Loves at TIFF; MAD World has Thirteen in Gaza.)

The war in Israel and Gaza continues to dominate headlines, but for most mainstream domestic distributors, any film about Israel or Palestine remains a toxic proposition. Big U.S. buyers, fearing boycotts, online intimidation or worse, are backing away.

NAZA, the documentary exposé by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor about the IDF’s alleged system of targeting civilians in Gaza, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday night and was a standout hit of the festival, premiering to a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation. French sales outfit mk2 can still expect an uphill struggle shopping the movie to domestic buyers.

“It’s kind of too early to tell” what the film’s U.S. prospects will be, Abraham tells THR. “But my gut tells me — and I hope I’m wrong on this — that it will be just as difficult” as their last film, No Other Land. That documentary, made by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers and following Israeli settler and IDF violence in the occupied West Bank, won the Oscar and still failed to find a U.S. buyer. It ultimately was self-released, with a limited theatrical run supported by Cinetic Media and Michael Tuckman Media.

“I hope there will be a mainstream distributor that takes this film and carries it into the U.S.,” Abraham adds, noting that more than $21  billion in American arms and equipment has been sent to Israel since October 2023. “It’s so important for us that people in the U.S. really listen to the Israeli officers and soldiers describing how their weapons were used.”

Even Israel’s official Oscar submission is unplaced. Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything — which premiered at Sundance and won best picture last week at Israel’s Ophir Awards, automatically making it the country’s Academy Awards entry — is still seeking U.S. distribution, with Paradise City handling sales.

Edward Said: Between Worlds, an archival documentary on the Palestinian academic and advocate, had its world premiere at TIFF on Saturday and is also seeking distribution out of the festival, with Cinetic handling domestic and Dogwoof selling international. The film’s producer, Sarah Mowaswes, is not bullish about the prospects for a sale to a mainstream buyer.

“The big distributors really can boast about how they want films like this made, and they want films from unique voices or from different diasporas, but they’re not actually taking those risks,” she tells THR.

So instead of counting on a big U.S. sale, Mowaswes spent the run-up to the festival canvassing the filmmakers behind other Palestinian-led projects — among them Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You — on how they had reached audiences outside the traditional model. The strategy she took from those conversations was to build the audience directly, online, before the premiere. Between Worlds was posting clips on social media before the film had screened for anyone.

“That’s a really exciting audience for us because we’re seeing public opinion shifting in the U.S. pretty dramatically among younger audiences who support Palestine,” she says. “We’re seeing our friends who are making these other Palestinian films and how younger audiences are going to see their films.”

Indeed, when No Other Land was eventually released independently, it grossed more than $2.5 million at the U.S. box office, an impressive achievement for a non-English-language documentary.

“We’ve seen a real shift, with increasingly diverse audiences seeking out Palestinian stories and connecting with them on a universal level,” adds Badie Ali, co-founder of Palestine-focused U.S. distributor Watermelon Pictures, which released All That’s Left of You and features like Palestine 36 and American Doctor stateside. “The audience is clearly ahead of the market in recognizing their value.”

The Jewish-Israeli community also is turning out for films that aren’t getting mainstream support. TIFF provided its own case study last year, when the festival briefly pulled Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue — a Canadian documentary about retired Israeli general Noam Tibon’s rescue of his family during the Oct. 7 attacks — from its lineup. A public outcry reversed the decision within days, with TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey issuing a public apology. The Road Between Us premiered to protests, but went on to win the People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary and had a successful local release. “Jewish audiences really came out for it,” notes one Canadian distributor.

Those audiences may be ready to embrace Nesher’s Our Loves, which traces the lives of people changed forever by Oct. 7 — and not just in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the violence and horror, the director, drawing on real stories of survivors, has managed to make a sort of comedy out of one of the worst days in recent Israeli history.

“I met all these people and I interviewed them, and after they survived, they began to reconsider their lives,” he says. “Many of them talked about change, about how things could not stay as they are. Obviously, the greater metaphor is national. You have to change the government that allowed this to happen.”

Ahead of TIFF, some pro-Palestine activist groups called for Our Loves to be pulled from the festival. Security will be tight at Sunday’s public screening. Nesher calls the protests “extremely foolish,” noting that his film is critical of the Israeli government and its conduct on Oct. 7. “Believe you me, the Israeli government is not happy that the movie will come out two weeks before [the Israeli] election,” he says.

He is thankful to TIFF for showing the film, countering what he calls an “apparent boycott” of Israeli cinema at the big European festivals in the wake of Oct. 7 and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. “For many years, Israeli cinema was kind of flourishing internationally, you’d always have five, six Israeli movies at the big European festivals. Now it’s rare to get one, and usually the one that matches the political outlook of the European press.” Toronto, by contrast, he says, “has always been about cinema, and showing films from all sides.”

The lack of big festival support has made it harder to land U.S. distribution for Israeli films, Nesher admits, but he says the Jewish film festival circuit is expanding to fill the gap.

“The number of Jewish film festivals has almost doubled or tripled in the past few years to compensate,” he says. “We have more than 100 offers from Jewish film festivals [for Our Loves], which can be attractive for distributors, because the festivals provide instant income.”

Jewish filmmakers at TIFF are also getting a boost from Shooq, a new matchmaking platform, named after the Hebrew word for marketplace, that launched at TIFF: The Market this week with the goal of linking Jewish creators with investors, media funds, studios, foundations and philanthropists.

“Great stories shape culture. And for the past several years, outstanding Jewish creators have struggled to secure the funding needed to bring their projects to life,” said Ari Pinchot, one of Shooq’s founders. “Many investors and philanthropists have been eager to support meaningful media but lacked both a trusted way to curate projects and an efficient mechanism and/or the means to fully finance them. Shooq is the solution.”

Shooq’s advisory board includes former NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman, 30WEST CEO Micah Green, Made by Us co-CEO Tanya Cohen, actress Emmanuelle Chriqui, producer Anthony Bregman and Israeli media group Keshet International. 

What is taking shape on both sides of the political divide is a distribution system that runs parallel to the mainstream rather than through it. Palestinian films are reaching audiences via specialist distributors and social-first campaigns aimed at younger viewers whose politics on Israel-Gaza are already shifting. Israeli films, shut out from more conventional routes, are finding opportunity in the growing Jewish festival circuit. Both paths are meeting audience demand. But neither, for now, is putting audiences from either side in the same room.

The filmmakers behind Thirteen in Gaza and NAZA, behind Edward Said: Between Worlds and Our Loves all hope mainstream distributors get over their fears and recognize the audience for these movies, however politically fraught their subject matter, is out there, and growing. For now, the filmmakers have stopped waiting. By the time the big distributors decide the risk is worth taking, they may find the market for these movies is already being built without them. 

Mia Galuppo contributed to this report.