Jenin, Jenin (2003)

In April 2002, Israeli military forces launched Operation Defensive Shield, a large-scale incursion into the West Bank that included an intensive ground offensive in the Jenin refugee camp. The operation lasted roughly a fortnight and left the camp in widespread ruin. The scale of the civilian casualties and the physical destruction drew international attention, with human rights organisations and journalists attempting to piece together what had happened in the narrow alleyways of the camp's densely populated streets. It was in the immediate aftermath of this that Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri travelled to Jenin to document what he found there, filming among the rubble and speaking to the survivors who remained. The result was Jenin, Jenin, a 54-minute documentary completed and released in 2003. The film has itself become a contested object: it was banned from screening in Israel by the Israeli Film Ratings Board, a decision that prompted significant legal and cultural debate about censorship, testimony and whose account of a conflict is permitted to circulate. That controversy is, in many ways, inseparable from the film itself.

Bakri was already a well-known figure in Palestinian and Israeli cinema as an actor before turning the camera on this subject, and Jenin, Jenin is a deliberately personal piece of filmmaking. There is no studio infrastructure behind it in the conventional sense, and the production circumstances were, by any measure, difficult. What Bakri assembled is essentially a record of testimony, survivors and witnesses speaking directly to the camera about what they experienced, set against the visual evidence of what the camp looked like in the weeks following the offensive. It sits in the tradition of witness documentary filmmaking, raw and uncomfortably direct, closer in spirit to a historical record than to a polished but unremarkable broadcast production. For anyone who follows Palestinian cinema more broadly, it makes an interesting companion piece to more recent work from the region, including No Other Land (2024) and All That's Left of You (2025), both of which also grapple with documenting Palestinian lives under ongoing pressures. As a documentary, it also sits alongside other short-form non-fiction films in a tradition of geographically specific, grassroots witness work, the kind you occasionally find reviewed here, such as Island Soldier (2017), which similarly focuses on a small community carrying a disproportionate burden of wider political forces.

Because the principal cast is, by the nature of the film, composed of ordinary people speaking about their experiences rather than professional performers, there is no conventional cast list to speak of. The faces on screen are not there to perform a role but to bear witness, and that distinction matters when watching the film. Bakri himself is both the guiding presence behind the camera and, in a sense, a participant, a Palestinian man returning to a devastated place and asking people to describe what happened to them. The moral and emotional weight of that position is felt throughout the film's 54 minutes.

24 years ago this was released. 24 years later the same atrocities, injustice and blatant murder is occurring to the same people by the same aggressors. I've watched a fair few documentaries about this region now, from various perspectives and various countries and from various historical times. One thing appears to be constant... the aggressors.

Watching Jenin, Jenin now, that sense of cyclical horror is what stays with you longest. The specific details of 2002 feel both historically located and horribly familiar, and the film functions almost as an early chapter in a story that has refused to end. For me, that is what separates this kind of documentary from more comfortable non-fiction filmmaking: it does not allow you the relief of historical distance. It demands you sit with the continuity. Some films age into curiosities. This one has aged, grimly, into evidence.

Rating: Not rated  | Year: 2003  | Watched: 2026-03-07

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca

More from Palestinian Territory: No Other Land (2024)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)