Art & Culture

Inside ‘Habibi Hussein’ and the Story That Almost Went Unseen

BYMeriem Belhiba

August 10, 2026

Habibi Hussein begins with two Palestinian men trying to repair a car in Jenin. As they work, they talk about a group of foreigners who have arrived in the occupied West Bank city with an ambitious plan: to restore Cinema Jenin, a once-popular movie theater that had been closed since the First Intifada.

The restoration would eventually become the subject of Cinema Jenin, a 2011 documentary by German filmmaker Markus Vetter, which followed the international effort to bring the theater back to life. Palestinian filmmaker Alex Bakri had been part of that project, working on location as a co-director and cameraman. But while his camera was ostensibly documenting the same story, it kept being drawn somewhere else.

Before Habibi Hussein introduces the people arriving with money, resources, and expertise, it introduces them through the Palestinians already there. It is a small reversal, but one that contains much of what Bakri would eventually do with the film: shift the center of gravity away from those who came to Jenin to restore the cinema and toward the people whose lives were already bound up with it.

One of them was Hussein Darbi, the last projectionist of Jenin Cinema. “For me, it was very natural,” Bakri tells us at the Amman International Film Festival (AIFF), where Habibi Hussein screened this year. “If you are making a film about a cinema, you make it through the projectionist.”

Filmstill from Habibi Hussein by Alex Bakri (2025) — Filmstill from *Habibi Hussein* by Alex Bakri (2025)

Darbi, then 59, had spent 43 years working there. He knew its projectors and its history, as well as the people across the West Bank who still carried fragments of an almost vanished cinematic craft. Bakri’s camera kept returning to him.

It was only later, when Bakri traveled to Germany and watched an early edit of Cinema Jenin, that he realized how differently he and Vetter had understood the material they were filming. Darbi, who had become central to the story Bakri saw unfolding in Jenin, occupied a much smaller place in the German filmmaker’s version. Bakri did not recognize the point of view as his own. “I didn’t like the film artistically or politically,” he says. He withdrew his name as co-director, took the footage he had filmed with Darbi, and began making another film from it. That film became Habibi Hussein.

Years later, people who had worked on the restoration watched Habibi Hussein and told him: “We were there. These things happened in front of us and we didn’t see them.”

That sentence perhaps explains the difference between the two films better than any argument about objectivity could. Bakri does not see differently because he has somehow escaped subjectivity. He sees differently because he is Palestinian, because the political and social reality around the project is not something he enters temporarily, and because gestures that may appear incidental from one position carry another meaning from within it.

His frames catch these dynamics almost incidentally. In one final frame, a Palestinian man stands at a gate before someone closes it in front of his face. Bakri immediately recognized the power contained in the gesture. “I was aware of these dynamics,” he says.

This is where his frustration with the way Palestine is so often represented becomes particularly sharp. “When the West comes to Palestine, we become decoration,” he says. “We become the background.” The Palestinian may be everywhere in the image and still not be the person through whom the image acquires meaning. The outsider arrives, acts, discovers, and helps; Palestine becomes the landscape through which their story moves. “This is not my story through you,” Bakri says. “This is my land, my story, from my point of view. I’m not decoration.”

Edward Said’s writing on representation inevitably hovers somewhere behind that statement: the question is not simply whether Palestinians appear, but who possesses the authority to interpret what their appearance means. Bakri claims that authority unapologetically. He knows the place from within. But Habibi Hussein becomes more interesting because he does not exercise that authority over Darbi in the same way. His proximity to Darbi gradually changes the relationship between director and subject.

When Bakri began filming, documentary was new to him. His instinct was to follow people with the camera. With Darbi, he learned to stay still. “I started sitting with him,” he says. “I would put the camera somewhere and stay.” Darbi would enter the composition, disappear from it, and return somewhere Bakri had not anticipated. “Sometimes he would come in and suddenly it was the perfect close-up,” Bakri remembers. “At some point, it felt like he was directing me.”

This is where Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of “speaking nearby,” rather than simply speaking about, becomes useful. Not because Bakri must somehow surrender his Palestinian perspective or pretend that the filmmaker and subject occupy equal positions. Rather, it helps describe the way he reduces the distance created by the director’s authority. He stays close enough to Darbi, for long enough, that Darbi begins participating in how he will be seen. “Hussein has credit for the language of the film,” Bakri says. “He was part of creating that language.”

Their closeness continued when the camera was off. Darbi would work late at the cinema and Bakri would sometimes simply sit with him. “I would put the camera aside and we would talk.” Over the years, he showed the projectionist parts of the edit. Darbi kept asking when the film would be finished. He died before seeing it completed.

That proximity is what pushes Habibi Hussein beyond simply moving the late Darbi from the edge of somebody else’s narrative to the center of Bakri’s own. Bakri begins from a position the foreign filmmakers cannot occupy: he is Palestinian, reading gestures, hierarchies, and meanings from within the world being filmed. But the longer he stays with Darbi, the more he also reduces the distance created by his own authority as director. Darbi does not only become the subject of the film; he alters its rhythm, its framing and the way Bakri learns to look.

Here, authorship becomes less about speaking on someone’s behalf and more about a negotiation between the person behind the camera and the person in front of it.

Inside ‘Habibi Hussein’ and the Story That Almost Went Unseen

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Inside ‘Habibi Hussein’ and the Story That Almost Went Unseen

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