Wedding in Galilee (1987)
Dir. Michel Khleifi
Palestine / Belgium / France | 110 min
Languages: Arabic, Hebrew (English subtitles)
The first Palestinian narrative feature to receive international distribution, Michel Khleifi’s 1987 film, winner of the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, is a remarkably layered and intimate portrait. Filmed in Galilee and the West Bank, Wedding in Galilee is a powerful and rarely screened work that transforms a wedding ceremony into a gripping study of power, ritual, and life under occupation. When a village leader must seek permission from the Israeli military governor to hold his son’s wedding after curfew, the celebration becomes a charged negotiation in which hospitality, honour, and authority are placed under intense scrutiny.
Michel Khleifi’s film uses the rituals of marriage, music, procession, food, and gendered labour, to reveal how colonial power penetrates everyday life, while also foregrounding acts of endurance, care, and quiet resistance. Blending social realism with allegory, the film offers a nuanced and deeply human portrait of authority as something enacted, performed, and continually contested, sustained through everyday acts of surveillance and compliance.
Part of Sandpit Collective’s Film Programme ‘Other Asias’ in partnership with the University of Sussex.
Screening as part of Mirrors for Princes, a season inspired by the classical Arabic tradition of ethical writing on governance (مرايا الأمراء), Wedding in Galilee functions as a cinematic mirror on power, asking how rulers are made visible, tested, and undone through intimate social encounters rather than by formal institutions.
The screening will be preceded by an introduction to contextualise the film.