In March, The Encampments, a documentary on the pro-Palestinian protest movement on US college campuses, opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York. The nonfiction theatrical marketplace has never been breezy in the US, but this is a particularly difficult time for documentaries, let alone films about hot-button issues considered politically sensitive or, under the new administration, outright dangerous; one of the Encampments’ primary subjects, the Columbia University student-activist Mahmoud Khalil, remains in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge for any crime. Large-scale distributors, including all of the major streaming services, are increasingly wary of anything deemed controversial, leaving such films as Union, on the Amazon Labor Union, or the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land without distribution in the US.
Nevertheless, over an exclusive first-weekend run, The Encampments made $80,000 at the Angelika – the highest per-screen average for a documentary since the Oscar-winning Free Solo in 2018. That number may sound like peanuts compared with, say, the multimillion theatrical haul of a Marvel movie, but it’s a significant win for the specialty box office – and validation for a film whose mere existence, as a pro-Palestinian narrative, led to threats of violence at the Angelika, an incident of vandalism in the theater’s lobby and social media censorship of its ads.
That it reached a theater at all is the work of Watermelon Pictures, an upstart film financing and distribution company aiming to bring Palestinian and other marginalized voices to new audiences. The Chicago-based label, founded by brothers Hamza and Badie Ali in April 2024, is single-handedly hustling to get Palestinian films on screens large and small, filling a crucial hole in the entertainment market and providing an outlet for a long-underserved community.
“We see ourselves as a distributor that’s willing to take risks,” Hamza Ali told the Guardian from the label’s Chicago offices. For most of Watermelon’s slate – including The Encampments, the West Bank-set narrative drama The Teacher and the Palestinian anthology film From Ground Zero – “distributors aren’t wanting to take the risk because of backlash. We see ourselves as a home for them. And there is an audience.”
The Ali brothers first conceived of Watermelon Pictures – so named for the fruit that became a symbol of Palestinian resistance, sharing the colors of the national flag – in the wake of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks that precipitated Israel’s ruthless war in Gaza, which has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians and destroyed nearly every home in the territory. The label honors their father Malik and uncle Waleed, Palestinian-Americans who, in 1976, founded MPI Media Group in Chicago as a small, bespoke distribution company; the entrepreneurs graduated from delivering film rolls at select screenings to TV rights, DVDs and foreign distribution deals.
As, to their knowledge, the only Palestinian-led distribution company in North America, “we came to the realization that we need to do something” in the wake of the war in Gaza, said Badie. Watermelon Pictures, as a label specifically devoted to the perspective of Palestine and other resistance movements, was “an opportunity that we felt we had to do”.
The brothers have focused, in part, on giving films that challenge the conventional US narrative on Palestine – one that invariably privileges the justifications of the Israeli state – a theatrical run. From Ground Zero, an anthology of shorts from 22 Palestinian directors on life and death in Gaza, played in select theaters and made the Oscar shortlist for best international film. In January, Watermelon acquired the US distribution rights for The Teacher, a political thriller from the Palestinian-British director Farah Nabulsi starring Saleh Bakri and Imogen Poots, whose distribution prospects languished after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023. The film, based on a real 2011 prisoner swap, when Israel freed more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one IDF soldier, hit US theaters in April.
And this month, the company launched Watermelon+, a new streaming service that will serve as a home for its upcoming releases as well as several decades’ worth of Palestinian cinema – films with limited reach or lapsed distribution rights, if they were even available in the west to begin with. “It guarantees that we don’t have to depend on anyone to make sure that these titles are seen,” said Badie. “We’ll always have our own platform, at least, as a backstop – if it’s being rejected by this or that, it will have a home no matter what.”
The subscription service, which costs $7.99 a month or $79.99 annually, has obtained the rights for 70 films – including Oscar nominees Omar, Five Broken Cameras and Theeb – with plans to expand beyond the Palestinian perspective. “Palestine is not alone,” said Hamza. “The pro-Palestine movement is growing, but we want to be inclusive and expand beyond that,” such as Hind Meddeb’s documentary Sudan, Remember Us, a film on the 2019 Sudanese revolution that Watermelon acquired this month for a US release later this summer. “The rising global south community is where the future is,” said Badie. “And we just want to be ahead of it.”
The eventual goal, according to the Alis, is to host a wide variety of content – reality TV, cooking shows, standup comedy and short films, some original and some acquired – that offer a different perspective from the still predominant trope of Arab and/or Muslim characters as perpetrators of violence. “Our job is to show that this isn’t who we are,” said Badie. Backlash to The Encampments, which mirrored efforts to keep theaters from playing the self-distributed No Other Land, only reinforced the company’s mission. “They’re nervous about what we’re doing,” said Badie. “But at the same time, if we’re not getting this heat, I feel like we’re not doing our job. We really want to challenge the portrayal of how we’re looked at.”
The brothers are continually in search of new independent projects, nonfiction or fiction, but noted that, for the moment, Palestinian films are defaulting to Watermelon, as currently the only Palestinian-led business in town. “Hopefully we see a time where other distributors want these films too, so that there is competition,” said Hamza.
In the meantime, Watermelon will continue to pursue its twofold mission: provide an outlet for Palestinian and other marginalized perspectives and, as Badie put it, “make far-reaching films that just humanize us and that appeal to a larger audience.”
“We’re going to do our part,” added Hamza. “It’s representation and humanization.”
