Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2018
“We can’t be free as women unless we’re in a free country. And even if we are free of the occupation, we can’t know freedom as long as we are subjugated in our own society.”
– Sama Aweidah, film subject
When an uprising breaks out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1987, a young woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family, and freedom. Naila and the Uprising chronicles the remarkable real-life journey of Naila Ayesh, a key figure in the First Intifada, which forced the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination for the first time.
Using evocative animation, intimate interviews, and exclusive archival footage, Naila and the Uprising tells the story the mainstream media missed: of a courageous clandestine women’s movement at the head of Palestinians’ struggle for freedom, bringing out of anonymity the courageous women activists whose contributions and sacrifices changed history, but whose stories have remained untold until now.
Film website: Naila and the Uprising
