Neither the End of History nor a Record of the Past: On 'Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive'
From the displacement of Palestinians in 1948, to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon during which the archives of the research centre and film institute were looted by Israeli forces, and on to contemporary disputes over concealment and authenticity in the digital age, images and documents relating to Palestine have, throughout the historical experience of Palestinians, long been marked by loss, dispossession and control.
As a result, Palestinian archives — whether personal or institutional — exist at the centre of an ongoing crisis of survival. Within a linear understanding of history, 'archival images' may appear as remnants of the past. Yet in today’s media environment, where images circulate excessively and history can be readily erased, it becomes evident that the 'archive' is no longer merely a repository of the past. Its production and disappearance occur simultaneously, embedded within power structures of visibility and interpretation. At the same time, the near-scarcity — the condition of being 'archiveless' — has given rise to distinct aesthetic strategies and forms of reconstruction for engaging with Palestinian archives.
To re-examine the archive, therefore, is not only to look back but also to confront the present. As a film festival situated within an archival institution — the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) — the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) seeks to move beyond preservation and historical reproduction. Instead, it opens up possibilities for reclassification, obscuration and even appropriation, responding to an ongoing historical rupture while continually re-inscribing it with contemporary meaning.
This year's Focus programme, 'Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive', brings together works across different temporalities and media. Each film reconsiders what constitutes an archival image, who lays claim to it, and how it continues to be produced amidst loss and rupture. For an institution committed to the preservation and representation of moving images, curating such a programme is not only an act of historical reflection, but also an attempt to intervene in the present.
Beginning with materials that are scarce or nearly absent, Restored Pictures (2012) and The Silent Protest: 1929 Jerusalem (2019) treat archival fragments as sites of reactivation. They revisit the histories of a professional female photographer and a group of women activists under British Mandate rule in Palestine, respectively, bringing into view subjects long marginalised within the archive. Through artistic intervention, these works move beyond historical representation towards re-imagination.
A comparable approach is taken in Partition (2025), albeit through distinct formal strategies. By reinterpreting colonial imagery, the film juxtaposes silent footage from the British Mandate period with voices and songs recorded in Palestinian refugee camps. Techniques such as enlargement, freeze-frame and shifts in point of view create an experience of audiovisual disjunction. In doing so, the film compels viewers to actively engage with the images, challenging the embedded power relations and visual regimes of colonial archives, and transforming them into contested terrain.
By contrast, Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (2016) adopts a more direct method, assembling dispersed archival footage to construct a historical narrative of Palestine from 1948 to the 1980s. Originally produced for propaganda or documentary purposes, these images are recontextualised into a radical historiography that resonates with the idea of the 'archiveless archive'. Through this process, fragmentation is reorganised into coherence, and absence into presence, allowing new meanings to emerge from disrupted historical contexts.
In R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022), the scope expands to encompass transnational political movements, reconstructing connections between Japanese and Palestinian filmmaking. The film itself serves as a catalogue of twenty Palestinian 16mm works discovered in Japan. Here, the viewer becomes a visitor to this archive of moving images, where one can trace how certain cinematic forms and political patterns recur across time.
Faced with the absence of archives, Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004) turns the search itself into a narrative structure. Whether or not the missing footage is ultimately found, the act of searching generates a new network of memory. It prompts reflection on how one may occupy the role of 'king' in one's own narrative, yet appear as an 'extra' in another's — revealing how narrative authority is distributed through the very absence of archival material.
Not only can archives be preserved and reproduced, but they can also be dismantled and rewritten. Using colonial archives as 'the camera of the dispossessed', Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022) and A Fidai Film (2024) both seek to deconstruct their authority. The former reworks Israeli military propaganda reels — performed by soldiers themselves — by reconstructing rhythm and form to create distance and absurdity. Through formal estrangement, it exposes the underlying power structures and viewing positions embedded in the images. In the latter, images from Israeli archives are actively 'sabotaged' through post-production processes of erasure, masking, removal and reconfiguration. By disrupting the original narrative framework, the film reclaims representational agency and allows 'the invisible' to emerge again.
Beyond conventional definitions, contemporary film technologies continue to expand what constitutes an archive. Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba (2017) and A Stone's Throw (2024), for instance, transform digital mapping into a contemporary archival field. In the absence of traditional archives, these works draw on Google Street View, personal diary films, sound recordings and bodily experience, converting gaps between images into a creative impetus. Through the interweaving of oral testimony, poetry and digital imagery, the archive becomes an evolving narrative form. In the context of Palestinian dispossession, 'to keep remembering' becomes a political act in itself.
Similarly, The Diary of a Sky (2024) reconfigures everyday life as an archive shaped by the sounds of fighter jets, electrical wires and flickering lights, recording life under continuous surveillance and threat. Where official records fail to capture lived reality, personal perception and documentation function as both supplement and resistance. Here, sound emerges as a crucial archival medium, extending sensory memory beyond the visual.
Following this thread of auditory memory, A Magical Substance Flows into Me (2016) traces Palestinian musical traditions through historical recordings. Within domestic space, chanting, performance and conversation permeate every cell of the body, dissolving spatial boundaries. When almost everything material is lost, the body itself becomes a site of storage and transmission. The movement and stillness of each muscle, each bone, constitute a form of resistance against amnesia and historical erasure.
In A Night We Held Between (2024), the body operates as an archive, reinterpreting rituals and performing 'Song for the Fighters' as embodiments of history and memory. Likewise, Dancing Palestine (2024) records the learning of dabke as a means of reclaiming cultural identity. Where image and text prove insufficient in preserving history in full, bodily movement and rhythm offer a sustainable mode of documentation.
In this light, the archive can no longer be understood as a static relic of the past, but rather as an ongoing process of contestation and re-creation. Whether through restoration, rearrangement, absence, search, or transformation into sound and embodied practice, these works demonstrate that when history is dispossessed, the archive — both as a noun and a verb — becomes a form of resistance.
For a documentary festival based in an archival institution, we seek to move beyond preservation. Our task is to ensure that images do not merely remain stored, but continue to speak. This also entails an ongoing question: what does preservation mean? Beyond display, can the archive become an open space for dialogue, where divergent perspectives may intersect and be debated and discussed?
'Why now?'
Because the present is still unfolding, and history is not over. The archive concerns not only the past, but also how we understand the present — and how we imagine possible futures.
Translated by Chao Cheng-yuan
