One Month in Ramallah
2025 · 25m · Palestine
Directed by Sawsan Qaoud
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Governor Laila Ghannam navigates Ramallah and el-Bireh for a month through protests, mourning, celebration and resilience, revealing how the city functions under occupation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most docs about occupation flatten everything into rhetoric—this one refuses the sermon and just *lives* in a month, which somehow makes the resistance harder to look away from; Qaoud's betting the boring stuff is radical enough, and she's annoyingly right.
A disciplined observational cinema that trusts the rhythms of daily life to speak for geopolitical reality—the formal restraint, the refusal of score or explanatory apparatus, positions this squarely in a lineage of Kiarostami and the Maysles, where intimacy and documentation become indivisible.
The tonal modulation between protest footage and domestic moments is surgical—there's a single choice to let silence breathe between sequences that reframes the entire emotional register, and on a 25-minute runtime and presumably modest means, that's the decision that transforms documentary observation into something that lands in the chest.