Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory

A meditation on Palestinian self-representation through the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) of the 1960s–70s. Drawing on globally recovered archival footage, the film traces militant filmmakers reclaiming image and narrative through revolutionary cinema, reflecting on struggles revived on screen — and those that remain off frame.

Mohanad Yaqubi: ‘The more I had to explain the motivation and intention behind the research (of the archive), the more the film’s flow became clearer in my head. There were great opportunities for rewriting the film, based on interactions with international audiences, and I was greatly relieved when I realised that I did not have to make a conventional “militant film with a message”. It was crucial to foreground cinematic form and aesthetics, and thus stitch a narrative from the ‘archival’ images and sounds based on the PFU’s own film aesthetics rather than focus on their narrative. This is how I came to question, at the heart of my research, what is in the frame and what is outside it, what is off frame.Militant cinema still embodies a relevant alternative model of production that points to a fundamental question: why do we make films? In the case of Palestinians, 1948 was not only their year of [the] Nakba, but it was also the year when they started to become invisible to the eyes of the world. The world, or rather Israel and the West, went on behaving as if we did not exist. We were absent from public consciousness, media, and the press. From the outset, our struggle for survival would clearly be linked to our visibility, with being seen and recognised. To borrow the words of Palestinian writer and historian Elias Sanbar: “For people who suffer from invisibility, the camera would be their weapon.”’