Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory is an archival documentary and an enormous effort in artistic self-preservation. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to combat Palestinian people’s struggle to produce an image and self-representation on their own terms, the Palestinian Film Unit (PFU) was established. Made of a collective of young Palestinian filmmakers, the PFU filmed the violent oppression of young Palestinians, their resistance and difficulties related to being a stateless people. Among the documented events were the Israeli bombings of Palestinian refugee camps and the Jordanian and Lebanese civil wars. Becoming pivotal elements in the emerging alternative Arab cinema movement and the anti-colonial underground movement Third Cinema, the filmmakers in the PFU were exceptional in the way they filmed the Palestinian revolution from day to day as it was unfolding and using film as a tool for resistance among the Palestinian people. 

Unearthing PFU films stored in archives scattered across the world after extensive research, director Mohanad Yaqubi’s archival collage resurrects an explosive material and, to many, a forgotten memory of resistance. The selected clips in Off Frame are tied together through their straddle of borders between fiction and propaganda, dream and reality. The film reanimates what is within the frame, but also weaves a critical reflection by looking for what is outside it, or what is off frame.

Mohanad Yaqubi

2016

62 min

Arabic dialogue, English subtitles