Heartbeat Tempo

by Elhum Shakerifar

In her 2020-21 artwork ¿Cómo está tu corazón? – Achike’ rub’anön ak’u’x (How is your heart?) Guatemalan artist Hellen Ascoli, weaves the words 'How is your heart?’ in Maya Kaqchikel, Spanish and English in white thread against a red, blue, yellow background. In English, the questions multiply...

¿how heart?
¿who heart?
¿where heart?
many ears
hear heart

A common greeting in Mayan languages, 'How is your heart?' is an invitation to locate your heartbeat in relationship to the collective movement and moment.

Ascoli's practice looks to weaving as "a form of recording, enabling her to transcribe her thinking into the material fabric, with the tools and rhythms wrapped up in its making". To record, from the Latin recordari 'remember', is based on the word 'cor, cord' — heart. The verb originally meant to narrate orally or in writing, with the idea of repetition in order to commit to memory. To know by heart.

As 2026 begins, the genocide in Gaza is ongoing — it has been over 27 months. This genocide has been live-streamed, repeatedly evidenced and conveyed to our collective consciousness through video footage. A ceasefire was agreed; the violence has not stopped. Avoidable, documented death every day, every hour, every minute. In August 2025, Awdah Hathaleen, a crew member of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land filmed himself being shot and killed by a settler. A few days later, Anas Al Sharif was killed by the Israeli airstrikes he was covering just minutes earlier. One has to question what video recording means, when an overload of images hasn't prevented violence, when the violence has conversely only become more unhinged. In contrast, the widespread violence in Sudan has been much less reported on, yet the stain of blood from a massacre in El Fasher in November 2025 was visible from space.

My own push pull relationship with film has only become more complicated in the past two years. Most of all, I'm confronted daily by the failures of the film industry's structures to hold what is humanly meaningful about the medium. Ascoli's invitation to re-centre the heart resonated deeply; I encountered her piece at the Nottingham Contemporary in the summer of 2025 as part of the exhibition 'Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen' and couldn't help but think: what later will today's films and filmic records exist in?

¿how heart?

In her searing second novel, Enter Ghost (2023), British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad stages a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank, crafting a telling portrait of the role of art and/as resistance. British-born Sonia reflects,

Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with the knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn't say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought to my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.

Palestinian film—purposefully looted, erased, scattered and made difficult to access in various colonial archives over the years—teaches us that a film's visibility in the present does impact on its future existence. Being physical, material things, films need to be cared for over time if they are to survive into the future; to be stored, archived, indexed if they are to be findable. They need to be re-digitised to become screenable—film to file and so on, duplicated and updated to the latest technologies also as a means of preservation.

In November 2023, the Palestine Film Institute showcased a selection of films by and about Gaza, made largely by Palestinian filmmakers, on the Palestine Film Platform; 'Unprovoked Narratives' aimed to give an image to the place and the people being tactically erased by the Zionist entity. One of the films, To My Father by Gazan filmmaker Abdel Salam Shehadeh (2008) reflected on the role of the photograph in Gaza. The film's seed is an homage to the studio photographers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, when photographs represented key moments in a life—a family coming together, a marriage. Shehadeh’s poetic voice over ushers us through the decades: “Those were days when people were prettier, when eyes were filled with colour, even in black and white. What has changed—the camera, or the eye?"

Through the film, we come to know specific photographers—including Shehadeh’s father—their methods, their care for photographs, we glean what these images mean for the people they represent. We also see times changing; in 1967, ID card photographs become necessary as a new layer of policing. Palestinians are forced to leave in increasing numbers, and photographs are taken to send to family, in Egypt, in Lebanon. Following the first Intifada (1987-93), Shehadeh talks of how UNRWA “turned Palestinians into photographs to be distributed,” as representations of the agency’s work: “we started to see ourselves in magazines and in their newsletters, wearing good clothes, taking vaccines and injections, drinking milk and taking fish oil pills”. The second Intifada (2000-2005) sees the role of photographs changing entirely, no longer objects of beauty and memory, they are images of pain and often it is martyrs whose images are visible “in the streets and on the walls, in squares, in the living rooms and at the painters”. Today, surveillance at Israeli checkpoints is probably the most prevalent and well-preserved form of photography in Palestine.

The film in itself, as all Palestinian images, is an archive, a form of resistance to erasure. Proof, witness, evidence—for the future. A stilled bid for survival, one that tends towards liberation and self-determination.

As one of the Palestine Film Institute's small, voluntary executive team, I was managing the inbox in November 2024 when a cinema in Portugal requested screen To My Father. The Unprovoked Narratives season had long since passed—in fact, we were in the midst of distributing films from a new season, "Provoked Narratives", which reflected on the changing gaze on Palestine and Palestinians through film—but our role is in facilitating such connections and conversations, and so I reached out to Abdel Salam Shehadeh to ask permission to share his film. He responded immediately, telling me that he was alive, safe, and that he was happy to know that we still had the film file, because he had been forced to flee Gaza, leaving behind all of his life's work.

¿who heart?

Who is your audience, we are endlessly asked as we make films—the question is posed to assess feasibility of the film in the present. It is asked as a gauge of a film's pre-existing audience and the possibility of capitalising on their interest as the metric that will enable wider possibilities. But this immediacy and short-term understanding of a film's life divorces it from meaning over time, and so from a sense of responsibility, a future. It is as if the film industry short circuits its own potential through the short-term and income-based mindset that it has proliferated around. Resisting this frame of thinking, Firelight Media director Loira Limbal recently urged film workers to refuse “scarcity, gatekeeping, and invisibility as inevitable” and to reclaim documentary, “not as content but as culture, resistance, and ancestor work”. Limbal writes about activating the archive, taking control of its agency and power. Where institutions become gatekeepers, the procedures and fees to access archives become policed, barriers.

How would we understand the history of social movements if the archives representing them were freely available? What does it tell us that a minute of film generally costs more than the minimum wage?

In their BALLE Closing Plenary Speech (June 2015), writer and activist adrienne maree brown reflects that "even those who hate me have heartbeats." As Limbal does, and as my interaction with Shehadeh confirms, they remind that survival is not a given. They suggest shifting our attention from the ‘mile wide inch deep’ paradigm to an ‘inch wide mile deep’ dynamic, asking "what our movements would look like if we focused on critical connections instead of critical mass?" For me, working with the Palestine Film Institute has been a recalibration, an antidote to hopelessness. The team is largely voluntary, meaning that we are engaged in the work because we believe in building a stronger ecosystem around Palestinian film. We are frugal and nimble—money is a factor of course, but it doesn’t drive decisions. Yes, we are often exhausted by the relentlessness of these dark days, but we relay and buoy each other, find solace in community. The heart's electromagnetic field radiates out; it is (depending on who you ask) 60 to 6000 times more powerful than that of the brain. As one of my comrades told me recently, “I have no space left in my heart for hate”.

¿where heart?

What will resonate from Senegal to Iran, Palestine, Sudan? How does a shared understanding of colonial legacy shape perspective? What are our measures of distance? I am reminded of the text Roger Assaf composed for Jocelyne Saab’s 1982 film Beyrouth, Ma Ville. Over the years, the prolific Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) developed a practice of working with writers, often friends she trusted to find the language to accompany the poetry of her images. This searing love letter to their destroyed city opens with an image of Saab looking up at the debris of her own home, eviscerated by an Israeli attack.

Qu'il est long le chemin qui sépare

ce qui est éprouvé de ce qui est dit

et ce qui est dit

de ce qui est perçu.

Les mots peinent, s'essoufflent.

L'indicible est plus fort.

Quand le malheur devient spectacle

on l'a déjà trompé. On est déjà touriste

au pays des souffrances.

La mesure de la compassion

n'est pas celle de la douleur.

Et devant les décombres d'un immeuble bombardé,

une distance indéfinissable sépare

celui qui est ému à cause de ce qu'il voit

et celui qui pleure à cause de ce qu'il ne voit plus.

Long is the road that separates

what is felt from what is said

and what is said

from what is perceived.

Words struggle, out of breath.

Overpowered by the unspeakable.

When woe becomes spectacle

we have already been duped.

We are already tourists

in the land of the suffering.

Pain is not the measure

of compassion.

And when beholding the rubble

of a bombed building

an ineffable distance divides

those who are affected by what they see

from those who weep for what they no longer see.

many ears

23
70
6
355

What does it mean that the film industry's metrics are, for instance, the reporting of a record 23-minute standing ovation for The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania at its Venice premiere, rather than the reminder that the film is made up almost entirely on the 70-minute phone call made by a 6-year-old girl calling the Palestinian Red Crescent from the car in which she found herself trapped, her relatives lying dead around her, having been sniped by the IDF?

355 bullets were fired to kill Hind; the rescue workers who tried to get to her were also murdered. Three hundred and fifty-five bullets.

Now in competition for the "Best International Film" at the Oscars, over the coming weeks, months, years, the echoes of Hind’s plea for care and safety, recorded and repeated through the film, will reach many more ears. Where will this small voice live in these bodies, and will it urge them to action? One of the film's producers told me that some audiences enter the cinema not knowing that Hind is eventually murdered; this feels as inconceivable as it is true.

When I first began to write this essay, in September 2025, the UK government concluded that Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza and welcomed a visit by the Israeli President. I am terrified to consider what genocide is, if not what has been unfolding in plain sight in Gaza.

rmo recently wrote to me from New York

still thinking about something sohrab said the other night. that if auschwitz was the end of poetry (adorno), gaza is the end of discourse. the word “genocide,” say, as a thing to talk about; that discourse has been severed from action and therefore from meaning.

hear heart

On 5th June 2025, Rainbow Collective's indie documentary To Kill A War Machine, which documents the work of Palestine Action, was classified a "15" for cinema release by the British Board of Film Classification. A "15" classification, BBFC's site explains, takes a view on Dangerous behaviour, Discrimination, Drugs, Language, Sex, Sexual Violence, Suicide and Self-Harm, Threat and Horror, and Violence. The BBFC decreed that people over the age of 15 can see the film, this age classification was given because of "images of real dead bodies and injury, criminal behaviour".

Less than a month later, on 2nd July, the UK's House of Commons proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000, forcing the Rainbow Collective to remove online access and cancel all screenings of To Kill A War Machine—further distribution or exhibition of the film being likely to constitute an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The Rainbow Collective's directors and founders Richard York & Hannan Majid published a statement on the film's website (https://tokillawarmachine.com/), concluding with this clear-eyed statement:

We feel that this is an important film, one in which activists and members of the public put forward arguments for why direct action is justified, morally and legally, against the companies supplying genocide. We also feel that proscription of a non-violent protest group is the most concerning example of authoritarian overreach that we have seen in the UK in our lifetimes, not just on the right to protest but on the rights of independent film makers, writers, journalists and artists like ourselves who should be allowed to platform the views and actions of non-violent protesters.

They resolved to keep the site updated with further news, and expressed their hope "to see you all at a screening as soon as we can get the film out there in a way that keeps everybody safe." The BBFC revoked their classification of the film on the 4th of July 2025, a day before the proscription was legally enforced.

I was reminded, as I read the statement, and lingered on the words "that keeps everyone safe", that I'd been in touch with Hannan almost a decade prior through the Rainbow Collective's Films For Food initiative: the collective would put on documentary screenings with a Q&A and ask audiences to bring a bag of non-perishable food in lieu of purchasing a ticket. In April 2016, through one screening of A Syrian Love Story by Sean McAllister, which I produced, we raised 80.3 kg of food, the equivalent of 160 meals.

Film, like a human body, is organic—living and breathing. It takes a village to make, decays with age.

What are we looking to, when we ask about a film's heart? The intentions that fuelled its imaginary; the people who lent it their breath; money that runs through its veins?

On the 108th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (2nd November 2025), several Palestine Action-affiliated prisoners began hunger strikes. By the next week, Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed, Lewie Chiaramello, T Hoxha, Amu Gib, Qesser Zuhrah, Jon Cink and Umer Khalid were all refusing food and water, their hunger strike intended to underline the UK’s legacy of imperialism and colonisation of the Palestinian people. To date, no bail has been set for any of these prisoners. Several are being held in privately-owned prisons far from their communities. They have all been treated with contempt and isolated from each other. Some have been incarcerated for over a year, but Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has declined calls to meet with families of the prisoners or their MPs.

In truth, I cannot fathom the courage it takes to go on a hunger strike. To refuse food and water, to experience your body shut down slowly. To walk towards the possibility of organ failure, the shut down of cognitive abilities. Loss of eyesight, hearing, memory. Death is the gamble—and has been a tragic outcome of hunger strikes in the past. 55 days into a hunger strike, the possibility of cardiovascular collapse and heart arrhythmia sharpen. I can only surmise a deep grounding between body and mind: a heart that beats so clearly that it is prepared to stop altogether.

As Kurdish writer and activist Dilar Dirik reminds us, "so much of the outcome [of a hunger strike] depends on how people outside of the prison mobilize to support those confronting death in isolation conditions, guided by their moral compass (...) hunger strikers take action to drive others to action. Their bodies become hourglasses for us all to measure our own commitment to truth, liberation and justice."

a.k.a. keeping everyone safe.

This isn't a film; we aren't simply spectators.

^{Elhum Shakerifar is an award-winning documentary producer and curator with a particular interest in film from the Global South. She has curated for the London Film Festival (2014-21), Shubbak–festival of contemporary Arab culture (2015-19), Barbican (Poetry in Motion: Contemporary Iranian Cinema, 2019), BFI (Drama & Desire, the films of Youssef Chahine, 2023) and Art on the Underground amongst others. She is on the board of the Palestine Film Institute and co-curates the Palestine Film Platform. Elhum is also a poet, translator (currently in residence at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich and part of the Southbank's New Poets Collective) and an avid marmalade maker. She runs the London-based company Hakawati ('storyteller' in Arabic), whose work you can follow at @TheHakawatis.}