They Do Not Exist

Life in the Nabatia refugee camp in southern Lebanon, accompanied in voice-over by a letter written to a fedayeen. A response to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who declared that the Palestinian people did not exist.

A great classic of Palestinian revolutionary cinema, They Do Not Exist is a must-see film blending a strong political discourse and original cinematographic experiments. With editing that creates a new language, musical sequences criticising a Western colonialist culture, Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the most important filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, refutes the provocations of Golda Meir.

Scenes in the camps, Israeli raids, activist training, Mustafa Abu Ali paints the portrait of daily life in the armed resistance. Yet, he goes further and lends the Palestinian struggle against imperialism a universal dimension: genocide against the Amerindians, genocide in Vietnam and Mozambique, the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany, and Palestine also has its place in this history.

Charlotte Schwarzinger, PhD student and cultural programmer, & Marion Slitine, anthropologist and exhibition curator