A Palestinian horror film inspired by folklore is moving forward, with journalist and author Plestia Alaqad joining the cast alongside American-born Kuwaiti-Palestinian journalist and media personality Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Titled The Visitor, the feature is written and directed by Palestinian-American filmmaker Rolla Selbak and produced by Black Poppy Productions.

The story follows a young Palestinian man in Jerusalem who must protect his family after a “Ghouleh” — a female demon from local folktales — emerges in his town.

Production is scheduled for a 25-day shoot in Jordan in 2026, with US-based Watermelon Pictures joining as executive producer and financier. The company, which supported From Ground Zero, Palestine’s first Oscars submission, will collaborate with Jordan’s Imaginarium on the production.

Watermelon Pictures’ head of production, Munir Atalla, told The Hollywood Reporter that Selbak’s vision “marks a bold new foray into genre films for Palestinian cinema“.

Alaqad, a Palestinian author, journalist, and poet, gained international attention for her daily social media coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Her memoir, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience, was published earlier this year by Pan Macmillan and was released in the United States in September.

Human rights, Arab identity
Shihab-Eldin, an Emmy-nominated journalist and actor of Palestinian descent, is best known for his work on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and various independent media projects focusing on human rights and Arab identity.

Selbak told The Hollywood Reporter that The Visitor “is about erasure, and the deep human need to be seen”, adding that “living under occupation can be scarier than the monsters in our folktales”.

Atalla told The New Arab in June that Watermelon Pictures was founded in response to censorship and the lack of representation facing Palestinian storytellers in global cinema.

“The [Gaza] genocide put into stark relief the extent to which the existing systems we have will never serve us,” he said. “We have to build our own cultural power and financial power to compete and fight in this ideological battle that we’re in.”

He added that the company’s new streaming platform, Watermelon+, was designed as “a living archive of Palestinian cinema”, protecting films from being erased or deplatformed.

Alaqad also told The New Arab earlier this year that her work had sought to preserve Palestinian life and memory beyond the violence.

“The media only shows Gaza when it’s being bombed,” she said. “We’re seeing how Palestinians are getting killed, but we don’t see how Palestinians lived.

“That’s where the dehumanisation comes in.”

Republished from The New Arab.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

American film star celebrity John Cusack, who describes himself on his x-page bio as an “apocalyptic shit-disturber”, has posted an open letter to the world denouncing the Israeli “mass murder” in Gaza and calling for “your outrage”.

While warning the public to “don’t stop talking about Palestine/Gaza”, he says that the “hollow ‘both sides’ rhetoric is complicity with power”.

“This is not a debate with two sides that can be normalised — and all the hired bullshit in print and on tv will never change the narrative,” he said.

His statement comes as hundreds of directors, writers, actors have denounced Israeli genocide in Gaza and the film industry’s “silence,” “indifference” and “passivity” coinciding with the Cannes Film Festival.

More than 350 prominent directors, writers and actors signed an open letter condemning the genocide and the “official inaction” of the film industry in regard to the mass suffering.

The industry open letter was published on the first day of the Cannes festival. It began by calling attention to the fate of 25-year-old Fatma Hassouna, a Palestinian freelance photojournalist, who was murdered in an Israeli air strike on April 16.

She was assassinated after it was announced that Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, in which she Hassouna was the star, had been selected in the ACID parallel, independent film section of the festival.

She was about to get married.

Cusack’s own open letter, offered as a template at X@JohnCusack last week, said:

“To Whom it May Still Concern

“There is a genocide unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. Not a metaphor, not a tragedy in the abstract — a genocide. Carried out in real time, in front of satellites, smartphones, and sanitized press conferences. And what has the so-called “land of the free” done? Applauded. Armed. Rationalised. Looked away.

London protest: ‘No to another Nakba”    Video: Al Jazeera

“The blood in Gaza does not just stain the hands of those launching the missiles. It stains every hand that signs off on the bombs, every hand that wrings itself in liberal anguish but does nothing, and every hand that beats its chest in right-wing bloodlust cheering it all on.

“The American far right sees in this mass killing a projection of its own fantasies — walls, camps, and the unrelenting dehumanisation of the “other.” No surprise there. And where are the liberals? Their silence is violence. Their hollow “both sides” rhetoric is complicity with power. And mass murder. And the machine of empire—greased with our taxes, shielded by our media, and excused by our moral debauchery .
How’s everybody at the Met gala doing tonight ?

“If you claim to care about justice — if you ever marched, ever lit a candle for any cause — then your voice should be raised now. Or it means nothing. The children of Gaza do not need your sorrow. They need your outrage. Your pressure. Your courage.

“End the siege. End the weapons shipments. End the lies. Call this what it is: a genocide.

“And if your politics cannot confront that—then your politics are worthless.

“In furious solidarity

“John Cusack”

Here’s a template –

To Whom It May Still Concern,

There is a genocide unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. Not a metaphor, not a tragedy in the abstract—a genocide. Carried out in real time, in front of satellites, smartphones, and sanitized press conferences. And what has the…

— John Cusack (@johncusack) May 7, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz