Critics Campus 2026 participant Alia Ardon evaluates the intentions and imperfections of Abdallah Alkhatib’s searing portrait of life under siege, making reference to the canon of absurdist and restorative Palestinian films and to key revolutionary thinkers.

In an unnamed city, a group of weathered adults are just trying to survive another day in Abdallah Alkhatib’s first narrative feature, Chronicles From the Siege. They break into their local video store. Outside, the dubious ceasefire is broken; they must shelter in place until further notice. The crew enacts the mechanisms of survival: a bonfire and the pleasures of a shared foraged cigarette. Once they run out of wood, they debate whether they should burn some videotapes – the rare documentation of a people – to stay alive. In the cinema, we all have Gaza on our minds.

Chronicles From the Siege premiered in early 2026 at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was awarded Best First Feature. By portraying the quotidian realities of life amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the violent occupation of greater Palestine since 1948, the film sets out to humanise the people under siege using humour. In doing so, it begs audiences to stay with the image of a human, just like you or me, existing under these extreme circumstances.

Alkhatib’s film comes into focus in the crumbling video store after two long, disorientating sequences: the first, among a crowd fighting for bread off the back of an aid truck; and the second, following an old man desperately searching his house for food scraps. It is made up of beautifully graded tableau-like scenes, interjected with footage coming from a home video camera found in the shop. In passing the camera on, Alkhatib attempts to hand agency over to his characters, but falls short as there is no narrative weight to the footage; the results are a disjointed rhythm and unresolved plot holes.

After the group make it out of the video store, Farah (Nour Seraj) delivers a humorous take on a woman who’s just trying to have sex within her situationship. “I only have half an hour,” she says to her lover. He is upset that she does not have enough time for him. “What? It usually doesn’t take longer than that,” she retorts. Somehow, despite the violent siege, the theatre is filled with laughs. The laughter evokes the words of renowned poet Najwan Darwish, whom I saw speak at the State Library of NSW in late 2025: “Humour is the best way to resist authority … The purpose of every oppression is to block you from everything that you were and to block you from becoming.” He continued: “Part of [occupation] is to make you insane. And as an insane person, you lose your humour. When you laugh at a dictator or the occupation, in a way, they don’t succeed. Because you are still who you are.” This quote guides my viewing of Alkhatib’s cinematic mosaic.

Stories like the one Alkhatib has attempted need to be told. Despite films of resistance from this region being subject to a Western cultural embargo for the last 78 years, an extensive canon of compelling Palestinian productions exists. Chronicles From the Siege has all the ingredients to contribute to this impressive lineage yet falls flat in its delivery. Who was this film made for?

Chronicles From the Siege

At MIFF, the producer of Critics Campus gifted me a copy of The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin’s seminal book on cinema. My mentor encouraged me to read Baldwin’s account of writing a commissioned script for a biographical film on Malcolm X. Baldwin describes the process whereby he was assigned a “‘technical’ expert” who would “translate” his prose into a palatable Hollywood vision of the African American revolutionary’s story. He writes that “as the weeks wore on … it began to be despairingly clear … that all meaning was being siphoned out”. He ended up walking away from the process. The film would go on to be made by Spike Lee in 1992, largely relying on Baldwin’s original script but with the latter’s credit eventually removed. In the conclusion of his essay, Baldwin reminds us:

If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not endlessly compelled to repeat it, and, further, believe it, and act on that belief … For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night.

Both Baldwin’s and Darwish’s reflections speak to the necessity of decentring the narratives of the oppressor. With Chronicles From the Siege, something was lost in the translation of the original idea. Its comedic representations of everyday life and the locals’ necessary responses to the ongoing genocide are elements full of promise and potential. But, along the way, just as Baldwin notes from his own experience, the essence is lost. The film’s vignetted narrative structure leaves many central plot elements in the dark, and its depictions of desperate Palestinians border on trauma porn – with a few sex jokes even chucked into the mix.

There exists a distinctive canon of absurdist Palestinian cinema, brilliantly exemplified by Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains (2009) and Divine Intervention (MIFF 2002). There is also an extensive canon of Palestinian films that represent what Edward Said calls a desire to restore the “idea of Palestine”, including the works of Annemarie Jacir or Mohanad Yaqubi. Chronicles From the Siege does not successfully contribute to these bodies of work; instead, it feels as though its intention is to remind those who have turned away from the humanity of Palestinians that they are, in fact, human.

But not all have turned away. I am reminded of this all too well as I write this feature at the Arts West building of the University of Melbourne. In 2024, the building was seized by students in protest, demanding the university cut its ties to Israeli military weapon manufacturers. The protesters renamed Arts West “Mahmoud’s Hall” in honour of Mahmoud Alnaouq, a 25-year-old Palestinian student set to study a Master of International Relations in Melbourne who was brutally killed in Gaza on 20 October 2023. Ultimately, Alkhatib’s film is hard to stomach because of the implicit distance it creates between the audience and its subject matter, when the two are much closer to each other than we think.

Chronicles From the Siege screens on Tuesday 11 and Wednesday 19 August as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.