Tomorrow’s Freedom

When Marwan Barghouti was a young boy, the IDF killed his dog. This, his son tells us at the start of Tomorrow’s Freedom, was the beginning of the occupation: robbing Palestinians of all worldly possessions until they have nothing left to fight for. Except, as we soon learn from Georgia and Sophia Scott’s passionate yet meditative documentary, such means of dehumanisation have come to have the opposite effect.

The Scott sisters first gained access to Barghouti, a Palestinian activist and Fatah leader, in 2017. Over the course of three years, they documented his family’s unrelenting fight for his release from an Israeli prison, where he has been held since 2002. A plaintive yet ominous score by Brian Eno, Massive Attack and David Milln complements the haunting cinematography. Shots of a Tel Aviv beachfront bustling with music and laughter, contrasted with the ruinous landscape of the West Bank and the despair of the prison where Barghouti is held, underscore the cruellest of juxtapositions. 

Archival footage of Barghouti paints him as a charismatic figure simply fighting for peace. A proponent of civil disobedience, he repeatedly emphasises that he holds no ill will towards Israelis, but rather the occupation itself. Found guilty of inciting the Second Intifada and sentenced to five consecutive life sentences, Barghouti and his supporters contend that his trial was illegal, a means of suppressing dissent and the most viable mediator between the social democratic Fatah and the militant Hamas. With the intimation that Barghouti was driven to violence, the filmmakers explore the line at which resistance becomes terrorism and ruminate on semantics. Jeff Halper, an Israeli activist, contends that the designation “terrorist” has long been used by colonisers to delegitimise the oppressed. The filmmakers, however, leave it to the audience to perpend these ideological musings.

Tomorrow’s Freedom is a triumph of humanity. Indeed, the opening shot – of war through a child’s soulful eyes – forms the beating heart of the documentary. In the face of an occupation that has long sought to degrade the Palestinian people as justification for their displacement, the filmmakers’ most radical act is, quite simply, extending a human face to the dehumanised.

Antonia Georgiou

Tomorrow’s Freedom is released in select cinemas on 26^th April 2024.

Watch the trailer for Tomorrow’s Freedom here: