Omar Al-Qattan is British-Palestinian filmmaker.

Recent articles

Palestinians’ modern experience is defined by exile from, remembrance of and longing for homeland. What has been lost, what can be recovered from the catastrophe of 1948 and the wars and dislocations since? Omar Al-Qattan weaves the threads of personal and national memory into a compelling reflection.

‘Return’ is a Palestinian dream, a compulsion, a wound. Is it also a curse? In retrieving the vision of a single, inclusive, secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis, Omar al-Qattan argues that his people need to make a different return. It will not be to land irretrievably lost, but to the best of their own history, that they make the best of the future now available to them and their neighbours alike.

The detention and deportation by Israeli authorities of a British filmmaker of Palestinian origin is a lesson not just in the vicious political realities of the Middle East, but in a failure of courage by the British government.

When a country and its people are not free, how do its artists respond?

This is not a clash of civilisations, in part because the battle of ‘fundamentalist’ Islam is itself a product of modernity. For Muslims as for others, an openness to contradictory modern life and identities, amidst the search for a common ethical language, is the only way forward.