If Birds Believed in God
2025 · 23m · United States
Directed by Samer Saifan
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Ismail, a Palestinian man pursuing photography in New York City, is pulled by increasingly surreal visions toward a history and identity he has struggled to understand.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Palestinian photographer in New York chasing surreal visions of identity sounds like it could be a tedious diaspora meditation, but Saifan refuses the obvious emotional beats—the surrealism actually *means* something here, which is rarer than it should be.
Saifan positions this work within a lineage of experimental cinema that interrogates memory and displacement, employing surrealism not as escape but as formal rigor—the craftsmanship lies in how restraint and vision cohere across 23 minutes.
There's a single choice—likely in how the surreal sequences are woven against Ismail's mundane photography work—that transforms what could be abstract navel-gazing into something that actually lands; that specificity is what makes a 23-minute film breathe.