How do we tell the stories of our prisoners? Across essay film, fiction, and documentary, this programme explores storytelling as a form of resistance against the silencing and isolation imposed by incarceration. Drawing from Walid Daqqa’s notion of parallel time—the suspended temporality imposed by colonial imprisonment, where prisoners are severed from the linear time of the outside world—the films reveal prison not only as a site of confinement, but as a space where culture, thought, and connection continue to exist. In the context of ongoing struggles around political imprisonment, including the Filton 25 case here in the UK, the programme also asks how narratives of prisoners are constructed, challenged, and reclaimed.
Screened as part of Falastin Film Festival (27—30 August).
About the films
Samira Makki: When Solid Turns To Dust, Or A Note On Liquidity From Palestine
This video essay explores liquidity, and its intermittent leaks, as a poetic and political proposition informing anti-colonial struggles. The essay takes its cue from a letter that political prisoner and martyr Walid Daqqa wrote in 2005 where he theorized Parallel Time under Zionist captivity at a high-security facility known as the Gilboa prison. More than a decade later, the same prison became a marker of the historical escape orchestrated by six Palestinian prisoners. Importantly, the escape became an attestation of the possibility of transgression: the Zionist project, in its high-security doctrine and carceral apparatus, are but an illusion made up of dust, as Mahmoud Al-Arda reiterated. The escape triggered the anxiety of the settler-colony not only as it denoted a leak from the ostensibly impenetrable Parallel Time. Rather, the leak expresses an outright commitment to futurity where there is seemingly none.
Rakan Mayasi: Bonboné
It is thought that wars and conflicts conquer the essence of body and soul, like the heaving of waves on a rough sea. An imprisoned Palestinian from the resistance forces is serving his time in an Israeli jail. Yearning to see his offspring, he contrives a plot with the help of his spouse. Will his attempt pan out as planned?
Al Jazeera: Walid Daqqa: A Parallel Life
This is the story of Walid Daqqa, one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, told by his immediate family and in voice recordings he made behind bars. From a sharp-minded boy in 1948 Palestine to a clandestine PFLP organiser sentenced to life imprisonment, Daqqa turns his cell into a classroom, a think tank and, eventually, a wedding venue when he marries Sanaa Salama inside Ashkelon prison.
Through intimate testimonies from family, former prisoners and his lawyer, the film explores Walid’s idea of “parallel time” – living both under “tonnes of concrete” and beyond the walls. It recounts the smuggling of his sperm, the birth of his daughter, Milad, and his powerful message to her: hate oppression, not people. As cancer consumes him and Israel refuses his release, Milad’s final chant, “Freedom for our prisoners. For my father”, echoes a struggle that outlives Walid Daqqa’s life.
Following the screening will be a Q+A with Diala Ayesh. Diala Ayesh is a Palestinian lawyer and human rights defender dedicated to advocating for the rights of prisoners and detainees. Her work focuses on providing legal representation to political detainees, visiting prisoners held in Israeli prisons, and documenting violations against them. She has continued this work during the period of intensified restrictions and near-total isolation imposed on Palestinian prisoners following the outbreak of the war on Gaza.
Because of her human rights work, Diala has faced harassment and arrest by both the Palestinian Authority and Israeli authorities. On January 17, 2024, she was arrested by Israeli forces and placed under administrative detention without charge or trial. During her nearly year-long detention, she endured mistreatment and prolonged isolation before being released on January 14, 2025. In recognition of her commitment to defending freedom of expression and human rights, Diala received the 2024 Freedom of Expression Award from Index on Censorship.
