So They Know We Existed (2021)

(0) based on 0 votes
When she heard the explosions around her, 15-year-old Sma Ahel immediately picked up her phone. 'I removed the password from my phone so that if we didn't make it out, and we were killed, people would know what happened to us. So they know we existed.' In their own words and images, this short documentary tells the story of a Palestinians trapped in deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas during an 11-day war in May 2021.
Directors
Release Date
Jul 14, 2021
Runtime
00h 14m
Actors
Genre
Available in streaming on

When she heard the explosions around her, 15-year-old Sma Ahel immediately picked up her phone. 'I removed the password from my phone so that if we didn't make it out, and we were killed, people would know what happened to us. So they know we existed.' In their own words and images, this short documentary tells the story of a Palestinians trapped in deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas during an 11-day war in May 2021.

Movies like So They Know We Existed

Fertile Memory

A portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives. Farah Hatoum, a widow living with her children and grandchildren, and Sahar Khalifeh, a novelist from the West Bank.
Search similar movies
6.7
Fertile+Memory
Fertile Memory

1981

Search similar movies
Waltz with Bashir

An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
Search similar movies
7.7
Waltz+with+Bashir
Waltz with Bashir

2008

Search similar movies
Shahida: Brides of Allah

Israeli director Natalie Assouline chronicles the lives of women, mostly young mothers, in prison for involvement in failed suicide attacks/terrorists attacks in Israel. Filmed over two years, this portrait strives to unearth the motivations behind their crimes. With the women's heads and feelings firmly covered, the film reveals no answers, just the heart-breaking tension between humanity and ideology.
Search similar movies
Shahida%3A+Brides+of+Allah
Shahida: Brides of Allah

2008

Search similar movies
Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority

A thought-provoking documentary on the current and historical causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. political involvement.
Search similar movies
7.5
Occupation+101%3A+Voices+of+the+Silenced+Majority
Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority

2006

Search similar movies
Blessed Blessed Oblivion

BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors.
Search similar movies
Blessed+Blessed+Oblivion
Blessed Blessed Oblivion

2011

Search similar movies
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

An Iranian filmmaker participates in a series of video calls with a young Palestinian photojournalist who describes her life confined in Gaza during the current regional conflict.
Search similar movies
6.7
Put+Your+Soul+on+Your+Hand+and+Walk
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

2025

Search similar movies
Promises & Betrayals: Britain and the Struggle for the Holy Land

A documentary on how British double-dealing during the First World War ignited the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. The bitter struggle between Arab and Jew for control of the Holy Land has caused untold suffering in the Middle East for generations. It is often claimed that the crisis originated with Jewish emigration to Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. Yet the roots of the conflict are to be found much earlier – in British double-dealing during the First World War. This is a story of intrigue among rival empires; of misguided strategies; and of how conflicting promises to Arab and Jew created a legacy of bloodshed which determined the fate of the Middle East.
Search similar movies
Promises+%26+Betrayals%3A+Britain+and+the+Struggle+for+the+Holy+Land
Promises & Betrayals: Britain and the Struggle for the Holy Land

2002

Search similar movies
Persona Non Grata

2003 documentary film produced by Oliver Stone for the HBO series America Undercover about the conflict in occupied Palestine. He speaks with Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime ministers of Israel, Yasser Arafat, late president of the Palestinian National Authority, and various Palestinian activists resisting the oppression of the zionist regime.
Search similar movies
5.9
Persona+Non+Grata
Persona Non Grata

2003

Search similar movies
Gaza, génération génocidée

Plot unavailable
Search similar movies
Gaza%2C+g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ration+g%C3%A9nocid%C3%A9e
Gaza, génération génocidée

2025

Search similar movies
What Walaa Wants

Raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank while her mother was in prison, Walaa dreams of being a policewoman, wearing a uniform, avoiding marriage, and earning a salary. Despite discouragement from her family, Walaa applies - and gets in. But her own rebellious behavior and a complicated relationship with her mother are a challenge, as are the circumstances under which she lives. Following Walaa from 15 to 21, this first-ever look inside the Palestinian police academy brings us the story of a young woman navigating formidable obstacles, learning which rules to break and follow, and disproving the negative predictions from her surroundings and the world at large.
Search similar movies
6.0
What+Walaa+Wants
What Walaa Wants

2018

Search similar movies
Here and Elsewhere

Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.
Search similar movies
6.5
Here+and+Elsewhere
Here and Elsewhere

1976

Search similar movies
HALEMEH

In the Gaza refugee camp of Jerash, Palestinians face the critical issue of lacking identification documents. This situation undermines their rights and hinders access to essential services and opportunities.
Search similar movies
8.0
HALEMEH
Israelism

When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the mistreatment of Palestinians, they battle the old guard to create a new movement opposing Israel’s occupation, and recentering Judaism itself.
Search similar movies
8.3
Israelism
1913: Seeds of Conflict

Explore an overlooked moment in pre-WWI Palestine when people's identities overlapped, and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities intermingled freely. Few could contemplate the conflict that would engulf their region for the next century.
Search similar movies
1913%3A+Seeds+of+Conflict
1913: Seeds of Conflict

2015

Search similar movies
A Song Called Hate

The pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist, BDSM-provocative, techno-punk performance art ensemble Hatari unsurprisingly drew attention to themselves with their performance at the Icelandic qualifiers for the Eurovision Song Contest. So much so that they won and therefore were allowed to perform at the main event in Tel Aviv. But what now? Should they boycott the event, swallow their idealism, or use their airtime to criticise the host country for their illegal occupation of Palestine? The Icelandic director Anna Hildur joins the boys in the band all the way to the fateful final.
Search similar movies
8.6
A+Song+Called+Hate
A Song Called Hate

2021

Search similar movies
The Good Soldier

A look inside the work of Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF combat soldiers who collect and publish testimonies of soldiers who served in the occupied territories. For six months, director Silvina Landsmann, camera in hand, accompanied the staff of the organization. The many hours of footage have been refined into a film that dives into the heart of Breaking the Silence’s work: guided tours of Hebron and the surrounding area, public lectures and house meetings, internal staff meetings and media strategy. All the while the organization is forced to justify its very existence, both internally and to the broader public, and to justify its place in the political debate. The Good Soldier raises questions about Israel’s dynamic mainstream and the challenges of confronting it.
Search similar movies
7.0
The+Good+Soldier
The Good Soldier

2021

Search similar movies
Tomorrow's Power

Tomorrow’s Power is a feature length documentary that showcases three communities around the world and their responses to economic and environmental emergencies they are facing. In the war-torn, oil-rich Arauca province in Colombia, communities have been building a peace process from the bottom up. In Germany activists are pushing the country to fully divest from fossil-fuel extraction and complete its transition to renewable energy. In Gaza health practitioners are harnessing solar power to battle daily life-threatening energy blackouts in hospitals.
Search similar movies
Tomorrow%27s+Power
Tomorrow's Power

2017

Search similar movies
O'ud

Ghassan Sidawi takes a trip to get to know more about a late friend of his family. While doing so, he learns what it feels to be a lost Palestinian artist from home.
Search similar movies
O%27ud
To Kill a War Machine

Through real-time bodycam and phone footage, frontline activists take audiences along on their audacious raids to tear down arms factories around the UK. Since 2020, direct action group Palestine Action have documented their operations to dismantle the companies and infrastructure supplying weapons to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Search similar movies
9.7
To+Kill+a+War+Machine
To Kill a War Machine

2025

Search similar movies
Three Promises

Yousef Srouji’s childhood in Palestine wasn’t something that he and his parents spoke of as a family, so when he found a box of his mother’s home videos from the early 2000s, an especially perilous and tumultuous period in the West Bank, the tapes became a means for remembering and comprehending a painful past. The stories she captured illuminate the nature of life in a war zone, and familial bonds that cannot be broken. – Bedatri Choudhury (DocNYC)
Search similar movies
Three+Promises
Three Promises

2023

Search similar movies
The dead still have a name

In 2010 the Freedom Flotilla attempts to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. In international waters the flotilla is attacked by the Israeli army and 9 people are killed. 9 anonymous people. But the dead still have a name. In 2014 Gaza is attacked by Israel. 2131 Palestinians are killed, among them 513 children. 513 dead children. But the dead children still have names. The film is about a Jewish person who has made a political journey from the Vietnam war to Gaza. This person is the paediatrician Henry Ascher, who lost his fathers entire family in the Holocaust.
Search similar movies
4.2
The+dead+still+have+a+name
The dead still have a name

2015

Search similar movies
Stallions of Palestine

A Palestinian family navigates the difficulties of raising Arabian horses in the West Bank, where access to vets and training facilities always seems to be a checkpoint away.
Search similar movies
Stallions+of+Palestine
Stallions of Palestine

2019

Search similar movies
1948: Creation & Catastrophe

The shocking story of the establishment of the state of Israel told from the perspective of those who lived through the end of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948.
Search similar movies
8.0
1948%3A+Creation+%26+Catastrophe
1948: Creation & Catastrophe

2017

Search similar movies
Five Broken Cameras

Five broken cameras – and each one has a powerful tale to tell. Embedded in the bullet-ridden remains of digital technology is the story of Emad Burnat, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in, which famously chose nonviolent resistance when the Israeli army encroached upon its land to make room for Jewish colonists. Emad buys his first camera in 2005 to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Over the course of the film, he becomes the peaceful archivist of an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.
Search similar movies
7.5
Five+Broken+Cameras
Five Broken Cameras

2011

Search similar movies
The Olive Tree

Filmed between 1973 and 1975, L’Olivier was produced by the Vincennes Cinema Group. This activist collective of teachers and filmmakers, formed on the occasion of this film, attempts to explain the Palestinian problem through interviews. The Olivier was one of the first films to attempt to give substance to what was still largely ignored in the West: the existence of the Palestinian people and their fight to recover their rights. L'Olivier responds to a concern: the already weak support of French public opinion for the Palestinian cause diminished following the Munich operation of 1972. Structured in such a way as to tell the Palestinian story and explain the state of the struggle at the time, the film appeals to global militant solidarity and, in particular, to European political commitments.
Search similar movies
10.0
The+Olive+Tree
The Olive Tree

1976

Search similar movies
Aida Returns

A poignant, sometimes sad, sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, often absurd story of a multiple journey: the journey of loss as the director’s mother Aida struggled with losing herself to Alzheimer’s disease, but finding solace in her repeated “returning” to the Yafa and Palestine of her youth; the journey of the loss of a parent; and the ultimate return journey back to Yafa where Aida would finally find rest and be herself once more.
Search similar movies
1.0
Aida+Returns
Aida Returns

2024

Search similar movies
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack

A forensic investigation into the impact of Israeli military operations on Gaza’s healthcare system. This urgent documentary examines evidence of widespread destruction across the territory’s medical infrastructure, where all 36 main hospitals have reportedly been damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of healthcare workers — including doctors and surgeons — are known to have been killed, injured or detained, with some alleging imprisonment and mistreatment
Search similar movies
9.5
Gaza%3A+Doctors+Under+Attack
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack

2025

Search similar movies
Tantura

When, in the late 1990s, Israeli student Teddy Katz exposed the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in the village of Tantura, in May 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, he was initially praised for his pioneering work; but he was soon infamous and branded a traitor. Decades later, incendiary new evidence emerges that corroborates Teddy's findings.
Search similar movies
7.7
Tantura
Gaza Ghetto

Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Family, 1948 – 1984 is a documentary film about the life of a Palestinian family living in the Jabalia refugee camp. The film, created by Joan Mandell, Pea Holmquist, and Pierre Bjorklund in 1984 is believed to be the first documentary ever made in Gaza. The film features Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and soldiers on patrol "candidly discuss[ing] their responsibilities." The film follows a refugee family from the Gaza Strip who visit the site of their former village, now a Jewish town in Israel. As the grandfather and great-grandfather point out an orchard and sycamore fig that belonged to Muhammed Ayyub and Uncle Khalil, an Israeli resident appears and tells them to leave, claiming they need a permit to be there. The mother tells him that, "We work in Jaffa and Tel Aviv and that's not forbidden," to which he replies, "Here it's forbidden."
Search similar movies
7.0
Gaza+Ghetto
Gaza Ghetto

1985

Search similar movies
My Gaza

The last 31 years, PeÅ Holmquist has filmed in Gaza, depicting the fate of its people in this often cruel world. Now Holmquist makes a personal reflection based on his many visits to Gaza, most recently after the three-week intense war with Israel during 2008-2009.
Search similar movies
My+Gaza
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989

Archival film maestro Göran Hugo Olsson has assembled—from a vast catalogue of footage in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service SVT—accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as witnessed and represented by Swedish journalists. Stories of the beginning of the Israeli state interwoven with the Palestinian struggle for independence. News coverage with Yasser Arafat and interviews with Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban during a visit to Sweden unseen since first broadcast. From the tenth anniversary of Israel’s founding to the First Intifada, perspectives and encounters with statesmen, civilians, revolutionaries, and intellectuals tell the story from myriad angles of an evolving media landscape, revivifying a history of the ongoing conflict.
Search similar movies
9.0
Israel+Palestine+on+Swedish+TV+1958-1989
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989

2024

Search similar movies
Resistance Climbing

In 2014, during a trip, American Tim Bruns discovered cliffs in a small village five minutes north of Ramallah in Palestine and got to work equipping all the easy routes, then setting up climbing routes so that we can start teaching people how to climb. Bruns and Harris also opened Wadi Climbing, the first indoor climbing gym in Palestine. Today, gathered in the conflict-torn hills of Palestine, a diverse team of Bedouins, activists and urban professionals have embraced climbing as a much-needed respite from the burden of Israeli occupation. American writer and climber Andrew Bisharat visits the West Bank to explore his own roots and the power of climbing to transform lives. This documentary is part of the Reel Rock 17 series released in 2023.
Search similar movies
10.0
Resistance+Climbing
Resistance Climbing

2023

Search similar movies
Israel's Reel Extremism

An examination of Israel and its society after many months of war, seen initially through the prism of viral social media posts - and exclusive interviews with the soldiers behind them. These posts, some shared millions of times, show soldiers humiliating bound Palestinians, ransacking their homes, joking as they detonate schools and whole districts, and laughing as they launch high explosive ordnance into densely-packed areas. The award-winning team behind this Basement Films production traveled to Israel to interview some of these soldiers, who proudly defended themselves and their videos, some expressing callous disregard for Palestinians in Gaza. Through additional interviews with Israeli radical groups, politicians, and media figures, the film reveals Israeli Jewish society in the aftermath of October 7th, gripped by a vengeance and hate that puts into question any possibility for peace.
Search similar movies
Israel%27s+Reel+Extremism
Israel's Reel Extremism

2024

Search similar movies
Farfour: A War Diary from Gaza

Amid the ruins of northern Gaza, Ibrahim clings to the only companion he has left: Farfour, a stray cat he adopted during the war. Farfour has become more than just a pet for Ibrahim. He has turned into his shadow, his confidant, his last connection to humanity. Together, Ibrahim and Farfour navigate a collapsing world, enduring a relentless siege while living in an unsafe building, with no water and electricity. As the war tightens its grip, Ibrahim must flee.
Search similar movies
Farfour%3A+A+War+Diary+from+Gaza
Farfour: A War Diary from Gaza

2025

Search similar movies
Gaza

GAZA brings us into a unique place beyond the reach of television news reports to reveal a world rich with eloquent and resilient characters, offering us a cinematic and enriching portrait of a people attempting to lead meaningful lives against the rubble of perennial conflict. Throughout its entire history the Gaza Strip has been witness to conflict and upheaval. From ancient times this tiny coastal territory, located at a crossroads between continents, has been a pawn whose fate rested in the hands of powerful neighbours.
Search similar movies
7.4
Gaza