Mai Masri was born to an American mother and Palestinian father in 1959 in Amman, in Jordan. She grew up in Amman, Algiers, Nablus and Beirut, and studied film in San Francisco, graduating in 1981. When she lived in Beirut, she was part of the student movement and was very interested in politics. She said: ‘I got the idea to study film because I thought film could be a medium that would combine several of my interests: as a Palestinian exposed to social events and politics, meeting people, the arts, travel, research. I wanted so desperately to escape boredom and normality’ (Hillauer, 2005: 224). In 1977, she met Jean Chamoun, a Lebanese film-maker, who, in 1986, became her husband. They founded Nour Productions and have co-directed documentaries for international TV channels such as the BBC, Channel 4, PBS and Al Jazeera Documentaries. They started to make films together during the siege of Beirut in 1982, but decided early on they would not make ‘classical documentaries’ (Hillauer, 2005: 225). Instead, they were committed to witnessing and testifying through documentaries without preconceived plans, ‘because people have short memories’. Mai Masri says about her film style that she likes to pay attention to details, which is reflected in her fondness for close-ups, faces and hands. From her first films Under the Rubble (1983) and War Generation (1989) onwards, she has focused on children and the influence of continued warfare on their psyches and bodies.

This chapter focuses on how Palestinian documentary film-makers in general, and women in particular, look at and ‘use’ Palestinian children. The constant question of whether a nation consists of people and land, or people or land, and the overwhelmingly young demographic of this nation is central to this. ‘More than half the population living in the territory administered by the Palestinian National Authority since the signing of the Oslo Treaty are under sixteen years of age’ (Hillauer, 2005: 197). Young people and children are central to the political and cultural identity of Palestine, and Palestinian cinema. As a continuation of Gertz's and Khleifi's work for Palestinian cinema, this chapter intimately links landscape to the child's body, while it investigates how trauma and memory manifest themselves in the representations of Palestinian children in documentary.