artist
Qais Al Zubaydi

Iraq 1945. Lives in Berlin.

Qais Al Zubaydi is a film director and editor. He directed a number of documentary and narrative films about Palestine, some of which won Arab and international awards.

Al Zubaydi's book Palestine in Cinema (2006) is a reference work, which documents the films that address the Palestinian cause at different stages of the conflict. Al Zubaydi collected Palestinian films about Palestine over the course of 90 years, beginning with the Balfour Declaration and ending in 2005. The book covers 800 films that were collected to preserve the Palestinian cinematic archive, which suffered more than one blow, especially during the 1982 invasion of Beirut.

His film “Counter- Siege” (1978) won the main prize at the Festival Oberhausen. It is a film which attempts to formulate a new discourse on the Arab-Zionist conflict post-1973 and initiate dialogue about peace agreements. In his long documentary work, “Palestine, a People’s Record”, completed in 1984, he collected rare and vital visual documents and recorded a number of dialogues and testimonies with Palestinian personalities and pioneers, many of whom are no longer with us. Al Zubaydi directed several films about Palestine that look at the issue from various angles: massacres, refugee camps, exile, etc. These include “Away from Home”, “Testimony of Palestinian Children in Wartime”, “Homeland of Barbed Wire”, “The Massacre File” and “Voice of the Silent Time”.

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