Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (خارج الإطار أو ثورة حتى النصر) traces the fragments of a revolution, splicing images of a dream for freedom from Palestinian struggle cinema — films produced between 1968 and 1982 in relation to the Palestinian revolution. 

For the outside world, these films represented a model of a people in struggle, explaining who they were fighting against and why.  But for Palestinians, the films marked a transformation of their identities, from refugees to freedom fighters.

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory borrows moments from a selection of militant films, edited together in one timeline.  The sequences lie on the borders between dream and reality, fiction and propaganda.  As the cameras recorded history, they also revealed what was missing.  The Palestinian revolution collaborated with filmmakers, actors, and activists from Syria, Lebanon, Italy, France, Germany, Argentina, and the UK and elsewhere, and built partnerships with institutions in Berlin, Moscow, Baghdad and Cuba.  Despite the prolific output of this movement, very few of its works remain.

Yet there is much to learn from revisiting this era, and exploring the narrative of Palestinian militant cinema.  Off Frame helps fill this gap in the collective memory, and brings the past into focus as an urgent element for present analyses.  Using cinema’s elastic nature of time to its advantage, the film transports the audience into the past, opening a portal into the lives and hopes of the Palestinian people in revolution — people fighting for recognition, and for control over their own identities and representations.