To narrate otherwise is already to fight. To hold the story open is to refuse the end that power demands. That, for me, is the most radical gesture cinema can make today: to keep time unclosed, to keep the story of liberation alive.

I often think that cinema is not only what we film, but what we refuse to film — what we keep outside the frame because it would be obscene to aestheticize it. In times of genocide, silence can serve power, but it can also become a line of refusal — a way of saying: I will not reproduce your images, your language, your spectacle.

I don’t believe cinema can change the world. What changes the world is revolt — collective, popular, material. Cinema doesn’t produce revolutions; it’s too anchored in the bourgeois system to do so. It produces images, narratives, affects. It is not the epicenter of history, but the echo of its tremors. Yet it can prepare the ground — shake consciences, expose the architecture of domination, and help the wave become a tsunami.

To make films today is to inhabit that fracture: between mourning and rage, between beauty and the unbearable. Cinema cannot stop bombs, but it can dismantle the gaze that justifies them. It can show the pipelines of violence — how colonial power extends from the battlefield into our buildings, our screens, our funding systems.

Palestine makes this visible in the most radical way. It teaches that every image is political: who films, who is filmed, who is made visible, who erased. Reading Ghassan Kanafani, you realize that every story is a form of resistance — that narrative itself can be a weapon. His words in Men in the Sun still haunt me: “Why didn’t you knock on the tank walls?” Maybe that’s what cinema must do now — keep knocking, relentlessly, against the walls of complicity and comfort. 

Here is where Abourahme’s thought on time becomes essential. In The Time Beneath the Concrete, he writes that settler colonialism doesn’t only occupy land — it occupies time itself, imposing a linear story where the colonizer’s future erases the colonized past. Refugee camps, in his view, are not suspended spaces but temporal resistances: they hold open another kind of time, one that refuses to close the wound, refuses to accept the story is over.

Cinema, I believe, must learn from that. It must abandon the colonial logic of narration — the cause and effect, the moral conclusion, the promise of resolution. Those structures mirror the same ideology that wants to seal history, to declare victory, to bury the possibility of return. Against this, cinema can tell stories that remain unfinished, circular, haunted — stories where ghosts still speak, where history leaks into the present, where nothing is ever truly over.

To narrate otherwise is already to fi ght. To hold the story open is to refuse the end that power demands. That, for me, is the most radical gesture cinema can make today: to keep time unclosed, to keep the story of liberation alive.

These past years have revealed how corrupted our field is — the festivals, the institutions, the industry that pretends neutrality while profiting from colonial regimes. Palestine exposed everything. It showed me who stands up and who hides behind careerism. It forced me to face my own contradictions — the privilege, the compromises, the proximity to power. I’ve been threatened, censored, but that’s nothing compared to what’s at stake.

What gives me strength is the network that’s forming — filmmakers, artists, and workers who, like in The Time Beneath the Concrete, dig under the ruins to think of cinema as a resistance to both space and time. People who understand that stories can reopen history — that narration itself can be an act of return, of uprising, of unfinished time.

The only cinema that matters now is one that stays porous, impure, contaminated by reality — a cinema that reclaims the right to narrate beyond colonial time, that aligns itself with liberation struggles, and keeps knocking until the walls break.