Juliette Le Monnyer’s Ramallah, Palestine, décembre 2018 (2025) wants us to bear witness. Within a tight ten-minute running time, this minimalist film unfolds as a controlled documentation of one moment of colonial violence during Israel’s occupation of Palestine—almost unremarkable in its sickening mundanity, even tame when compared to the genocidal atrocities livestreamed over the last twenty-three months. Le Monnyer, who spent two months in Palestine in 2018-2019, woke up one day in Ramallah to the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) parking their cars in the neighbourhood where she was staying. In the film, we see the soldiers performing their routine acts of oppression: they stand outside a roadside café, break into an abandoned building, and disrupt the daily lives of civilians. Palestinians, in turn, either observe the scene from a distance or engage in armed confrontations with the Israelis.
The film’s visual dryness is striking. Le Monnyer doesn’t add any embellishments—hers is a pruned but intentional refusal to remain passive in the face of illegal occupation. Filmed in one continuous shot, the film is exemplary of the filmmaker’s interest in deregulating cinematographic grammar and experimenting with framing and montage. Ramallah, albeit unedited, is carefully constructed: its camera movements and framing provide narrative texture while the restricted field of vision prompts questions about the power dynamics between the viewer and whoever captures an image. How are events being recorded? Who gets the opportunity to document? How is authoriality untangled from the ethics of representation—and does it need to be? Ramallah reminds us that the gaze, ultimately, always holds the potential of an agent of control. Its methodical camera movements progressively unveil a diorama of Imperialist vain and horror. The viewer, purposefully kept at a distance, is a passive observer bound by the eye of the camera.
Earlier this year, Ramallah had its World premiere at CPH:DOX—one of the most prominent international documentary festivals held in Copenhagen—where it won the NEW:VISION award for the best boundary-pushing art films. One of many festivals proclaiming to be “apolitical”, CPH:DOX invited Denmark’s Prime Minister (and Israel supporter) Mette Frederiksen as a keynote speaker at their opening gala. CoPro, Israel’s largest co-production market, reputedly pushing the country’s Zionist propaganda also featured on the festival’s guest list. Elsewhere in the programme, films denouncing Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its people conquer headlines and snatch prizes. Such is the calibre of the film industry’s moral hypocrisy.
In a recent panel conversation at Dokufest—Kosovo’s international documentary and short film festival held in August—Le Monnyer touched upon the ethical responsibility of filmmakers in times of genocide. “It’s not just about capturing suffering. It’s about refusing silence,” she comments. Ramallah succeeds at both. Festivals, however, hardly conceal their complicity. That’s something else we’re compelled to bear witness to.
