Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri

“A panoramic primer on the films of Mai Masri, renowned for their sensitive and honest visualization, through the eyes of women and children, of the everyday intimacy, dignity, courage, and fragile humanity amidst the searing pain of war and the relentless grinding of structural violence. In sparing prose fortified by long periods spent with Mai and her closest collaborators, Brittain’s walk-throughs of the films create an irresistible urge to (re)experience these extraordinary works of art.”


--Professor Beshara Doumani, Brown University




“The trailblazing Palestinian cinema of Mai Masri is at last introduced to the English reader in this riveting homage by journalist Victoria Brittain. In chronicling films produced since the 1980s to the present, the book offers a much-needed overview of Masri’s engaged documentation of war in ways that reveal its intimate dimension of loss and grief, highlighting the ‘poetry of everyday life.’”

—Ella Shohat, author of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements

“All Palestinian voices are important, and Mai Masri’s is among the most eloquent, through her beautiful films. Victoria Brittain is supremely qualified to tell her story.”

--Ken Loach, film director

“I love Mai’s work. In fact, she is one of the reasons I became a director myself.”

--Hany Abu-Assad, film director



This book covers Mai Masri’s three decades documenting iconic moments of Palestinian and Lebanese linked history. Her films, unique for giving agency to her subjects, tell much about the untold, unseen people, namely women and children, who lived these experiences of war and occupation. Former Lebanese political prisoner Soha Bechara praised her feature film 3000 Nights as “the ‘Lest we forget’ of Palestine." Her focus on the social and political climates of the vivid lives of unseen people connects to the deepening violence in Palestine today.



Victoria Brittain, a former foreign correspondent and Associate Foreign Editor of The Guardian, has reported from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and contributed to many media. Her latest book was Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror.