Ali Nassar's two films, The Milky Way (1997) and In the Ninth Month (2002), are constructed, to a great extent, along familiar lines. They may be defined as epigonic films, deriving their plots and styles from contemporary cinema and literature as well as from those of earlier periods, while simplifying and reversing them. Thus, the complex, deep, and multidimensional has become simple and flat, the implicit has become explicit, and what, in earlier films, had reflected the place and Zeitgeist has remained here unchanged, even when transferred to a different time and place.

It is precisely because of this characteristic that Nassar's films can serve to illustrate the different periods in Palestinian cinema, both those discussed previously and those to be considered in the following chapters. His films function as a useful reference point both for the examination of what has become commonplace and familiar in Palestinian films, and for the illumination of attempts to renew it.

The Milky Way was Ali Nassar's first feature film to be screened to a large audience. It combines the two types of past that feature in Khleifi and Masharawi's cinema – the memory of the relinquished land and the memory of its traumatic loss. In persistent and diverse ways it returns to the moments of trauma. Similarly, it also looks back to the golden era preceding it.