The quiet Palestinian: actor-director Mohammad Bakri on his life and work

Midway through my interview with Palestinian actor-director Mohammad Bakri, I ask him if he and his family ever considered leaving his hometown in Galilee; if, after decades of resistance, they may now opt for a calmer, less fraught life. He fell silent. A pensive look crept on his rugged, striking face. Five minutes later, he finally said: “I’d never leave, no. If they [his sons] decide to leave though, I wouldn’t be sad.”

“Can we take a little break?” Bakri asked, as sirens pertaining to the short-lived military confrontation between Israel and Iran rang in the background. 

For more than four decades, the 71-year-old Bakri has been the face of Palestinian cinema and the head of a hugely influential acting dynasty comprising his elder son Saleh (The Time That Remains, 2009; The Blue Caftan, 2022), Ziad (Miral, 2010), Adam (Omar, 2013) and Mahmoud (To a Land Unknown, 2024). 

Since his thunderous debut in Costa-Gavras’ Hanna K. (1983) as the enigmatic Palestinian refugee Selim, who attempts to reclaim the home his family was evicted from in 1948, Bakri has juggled international production such as Saverio Costanzo’s Private (2004), Steven Zaillian’s The Night Of (2016) and Tarik Saleh’s Cairo Conspiracy (aka The Boy from Heaven, 2022) with major Palestinian films including Michel Khleifi’s Tale of the Three Jewels (1995), Rashid Masharawi’s Laila’s Birthday (2008) and Annemarie Jacir’s Wajib (2017).

An eclectic performer with dashing looks, transfixing stoicism and steely eyes, the range and magnetism of Bakri – who could seamlessly switch from determined freedom fighters to charming fathers – made him the first Palestinian film star.

He made headlines in 2003 when he directed Jenin, Jenin, a searing documentary detailing the Israel Defense Forces’ devastating raid on the titular Palestinian refugee camp that resulted in the death of more than 50 Palestinians, with 23 Israeli soldiers also being killed in the fighting. The film, which was screened in June this year at the Safar Film Festival, was banned by the Israeli Film Ratings Board after lawsuits and accusations of spreading anti-Zionist propaganda. In 2016, a second defamation filed by one of the soldiers featured in the film resulted in a new ban and a fine equivalent to $52,000.

Bakri is having another busy year, touring with Maha Haj’s 7 October drama Upshot, which earned the best short award in Locarno last year, and Cherien Dabis’s sweeping family saga All That’s Left of You, one of the standout films of Sundance 2025. The spectre of Gaza and the increasingly precarious existence of Palestinians in Israel after 7 October loomed over our intimate conversation last week. Bakri’s passion and resilience animate his famously measured cadence; but a palpable weariness is now integral to one of the most recognisable voices in all of Arab cinema.

Bakri was born in the city of Bi’ina and spent his early childhood under Israeli military rule. At the time Acre had no roads, no electricity and no discernible infrastructure. A Christian electrical engineer named Youssef Boulos brought a gas-running projector to create the first movie theatre in Bakri’s small town. “We had a cinema in a town that had no electricity,” Bakri recalled. “The noises emanating from the projector were louder than the sound of the films.” With the aid of a small microphone, Boulos would do live translations to the mostly Hollywood movies that Bakri watched and worshiped. Bakri credits Boulos for nurturing his love for cinema.

Emerging at a time when Palestinian theatre did not exist, Bakri scored his first acting gigs at the Hebrew theatre. A political cabaret directed by American playwright Joseph Chaikin that tackled the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre attracted the attention of the Greek film director Costa-Gavras, who asked him to give a tryout in an audition that was conducted by his then assistant, Claire Denis. The resulting film, Hannah K. – which co-starred Jill Clayburgh and Gabriel Byrne – was among the first mainstream Western pictures to offer a sympathetic treatment of the Palestinian cause and the first to tackle the right of return. Assuming the responsibility of being the main Palestinian performer in such a groundbreaking work “felt like carrying a cross on my shoulders”, Bakri said.

His next film was Uri Barbash’s Beyond the Walls (1984), a prison drama centring on the unlikely partnership between Bakri’s PLO detainee and a Jewish convict. Beyond the Walls capitalised on the shift in Israeli public opinion in favour of a two-state solution following the Sabra and Shatila massacre where thousands of Palestinian refugees were killed. “Sabra and Shatila shook Israel in a fashion that Gaza sadly did not today,” Bakri said.

Headlining an Israeli production, however, left Bakri with “suspicions, questions and internal conflicts”. A sense of uneasiness pervaded the experience; an imbalance of power that informed each of the four Israeli features he starred in along the decades. “I felt that the director and writer treated my character with condescension: as if they were doing me a favour by having a sympathetic Palestinian man in the film.”

A disagreement over the film’s ending led Bakri to strike, and the shoot was suspended until the finale was changed. Despite the film’s success, most Israeli filmmakers refrained from working with Bakri, especially in political dramas. By 2006, Bakri had come to the realisation that he couldn’t work in Israeli cinema again. “I realised that my Palestinian narrative can never be accepted by an Israeli filmmaker no matter how progressive and liberal they are.”

The birth of Palestinian narrative cinema in the ‘80s was akin to “giving oxygen to my life”. Bakri was one of the founding fathers of the budding Palestinian cinema, first starring in the Gaza-born Masharawi’s short The Shelter (1989) and later in Khleifi’s Tale of Three Jewels. He refers to Upshot – an intimate drama about an elderly grieving couple coping with the absence of their children – as “the film that captured everything I felt about Gaza”. 

For many Palestinians, Bakri may always be remembered for his hugely popular one-man play The Pessoptimist (1986), based on Emile Habibi’s 1974 novel charting the plight of Palestinians of 1948. Combining Kafka and Voltaire with One Thousand and One Nights, this sardonic and painful drama made Bakri the biggest Palestinian acting star, a position he held until 2007 when his elder son, Saleh, took his mantle. The play was performed over 1,500 times the world over, including a successful run in London in the 80s.

He acted in various international productions along the years to sustain a living. Throughout his career, he’s been adamant on taking on roles that “did not offend Arabs and Palestinians”. His Palestinian films were no one-dimensional calls for resistance, however. They provide a portal into multifaceted Palestinian experience: the fading belief in armed resistance in the ‘80s films, the celebration of the submerged Palestinian heritage in Tale of the Three Jewels, the criticism of debilitating bureaucracy and corruption in Laila’s Birthday (2008), and the unsettling sense of resignation of leading an incomplete life under a ceaseless occupation in Wajib (2017). Bakri’s characters are no heroes: they are quiet, practical men worn out by an inhospitable reality they struggle to alter.

Despite his wide popularity, Bakri, like most of the Palestinians of ’48, was shunned by the Arab film and TV industry. A widespread misconception that possessing an Israeli ID indicates the Palestinians of ’48 have “normalised relations with Israel” proved to be a persistent stigma that thespians like Bakri and his three sons never managed to break. “Arab artists are anxious about working with us, especially in Egypt, home of the biggest film and TV industry in the region,” he said. “When Egyptian authorities are preventing aid convoys from entering Gaza through the Rafah crossing, it cannot allow a Palestinian actor like me to be part of its cinema.”

In 2021, Bakri memorably withdrew from Egypt’s Gouna Film Festival after the authorities detained, humiliated and deported fellow Palestinian filmmaker Said Zagha. Bakri refused to accept the festival’s lifetime achievement award. “Essentially, this was a reaction, in principle, to the mistreatment of Palestinian artists, regardless of their passport, whether it’s Jordanian, Palestinian, Israeli, or whatever. It is high time that Palestinians are granted full rights, like the rest of the world,” Bakri announced at the time.

“I’ve seen my people stranded in airports all over the world, but especially in Arab countries, under the mercy of [an airport] official,” Bakri added. “I’ve seen starving children with their parents, laying on the floors of airports. Sometimes they have to wait for days – not just one or two. I call on all authorities in the world, but especially Arabs, it’s enough.”

The five documentaries Bakri has directed to date reflect his growing disillusionment with the Israeli left. His latest film, Jenin, Jenin 2, was also banned last year, this time with no court order – in a breach of normal Israeli law. The spectre of his long and well-documented battle with the Israeli legal system still haunts Bakri, who has been paying his fine for defaming the Israeli soldier in monthly instalments ever since. “I don’t see Israel as my enemy,” he says, “but they consider me their enemy. They see me as a traitor… for making a movie.”

Mohammad Bakri was speaking at the Safar Film Festival.