On 12 January, a Palestinian film about Gaza will be inside the UK House of Commons. In a committee room off the Westminster corridors, therapists from the local NHS talking-therapy service will watch A State of Passion, then connect by video with its two co-directors, Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi, to discuss what it means for their work. The event is framed as “an invitation to reflect on therapeutic work in Westminster and the work globally in zones of conflict and humanitarian crisis” --- and as a fundraiser for Health Workers for Palestine.
There is a bleak logic in the fact that A State of Passion should reach the House of Commons before it reaches the multiplexes. It is not a film made to impress festivals, though it has done that. It is a film made to prod health workers, students and ordinary viewers into an uncomfortable space, bearing witness to Gaza’s continuing destruction; and to ask them, very simply, “What are you going to do now?”
A Surgeon, a Family, a War Without End
The film follows British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah through the aftermath of 43 days working almost without sleep under bombardment in Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli hospitals. News footage of the London resident --- pale, exhausted, still in scrubs -- circulated globally in late 2023, as he spoke of children with limbs torn off, amputations without anaesthetic, entire families erased, and the systematic targeting of medics and hospitals.
This was his sixth and, by far, his worst Gaza “war”. The film tracks him from Rafah to Amman, Beirut, London, Kuwait and Dubai, and into the cramped domestic spaces where the real reckoning takes place: with his wife, the political analyst and translator Dima, and their three sons. Together they try to make sense of why he keeps going back, what that choice costs them, and what it means to raise children between London’s relative safety and Gaza’s permanent catastrophe.
The co-directors have been close friends of the family for years. When Abu-Sittah finally emerged from his six-week stint in Gaza, Mansour and Khalidi met him in Amman. What they saw on his face, they told me in a one-hour exchange in December, was not the stoic, media-trained surgeon viewers had seen on satellite channels, but a man who had lost weight, slept little and fumbled with words, dazed and slightly confused. He had not yet processed what he had witnessed. They set up a camera at 11 p.m. and filmed for two and a half hours before his dawn flight. Vocal telephone notes woven through the film -- the ones in which we hear shelling in the background, or a doctor’s flat, tired humour as he describes setting up a “cemetery for amputated limbs” -- are real messages Abu-Sittah sent them while under bombardment.
The result is neither heroic war film nor pure testimony. It is something more intimate and more unsettling: a portrait of a family whose shared passion - “Palestine comes first,” as they repeatedly say - keeps pulling them back to the edge of destruction.
“We Meant it to Be a Tool”
From the beginning, Mansour and Khalidi did not think of A State of Passion as a work of art so much as an instrument. “We were always thinking in terms of a tool,” Khalidi explained from Beirut in the online interview. “What do we want people to feel? Well, enough emotion to want to take action, I suppose.”
Both women come from activist backgrounds. Mansour is a veteran documentary filmmaker whose works have long centred on refugees, migrant workers, women and memory across the Middle East. Khalidi is trained in health policy and has worked on mental health and health-system reform. Their first project together, more than a decade ago, was a film on mental health in Lebanon.
This time, they knew they were making a film inside an unfolding genocide, not about a war safely in the past. They worked under bombardment themselves: while Mansour was editing in Beirut, Israeli strikes were hitting southern Lebanon. “It was more like a challenge: you shall not overcome; we will finish this,” she said.
They also made for a series of very deliberate choices. They refused to use the most graphic images they had access to, even though such images are abundant in agency archives and on Abu-Sittah’s own hard drives. Two weeks in front of screens filled with shredded bodies convinced them that some scenes crossed a line between necessary shock and voyeurism. They chose instead to show only a fraction of the horror, with care not to expose faces or private moments of grief unless they felt it preserved rather than stripped dignity.
At the same time, they resisted the opposite temptation: turning Palestinians once more into faceless victims. “We’ve become used to being reduced to numbers,” Mansour said. “We wanted viewers to see people they could identify with as fellow humans, not just ‘three wounded’ in a headline.”
Above all, they wanted the story to be told “from us, from our perspective -- not in the language of the BBC or CNN.”
Dima and the destruction of memory
If Abu-Sittah is the film’s visible hero, its moral centre is arguably Dima and the wider family anchored in Gaza. Dima was born and raised there; her family’s land in the central Strip has been targeted repeatedly since 1967. By her count, the family house has been destroyed or demolished four or five times. During the current assault, the orchards and animals were wiped out, the garden burned, the house bombed. At least 87 of her relatives have been killed.
In one of the film’s most striking lines, Dima says that what is happening in Gaza is “not only a genocide; it is a destruction of memory.” That phrase captures something that slips out of statistics: the systematic erasure not just of people but of the physical and symbolic structures that hold a community’s past - the houses, trees, schools, family albums, the small details of continuity.
Sixteen months after shooting ended, Dima’s father is still in Gaza, homeless, ill, severely undernourished and refusing to leave. After the latest ceasefire began in October 2025, he went out on the first day to buy 2,500 olive saplings, determined to replant. Israeli soldiers shot at him as he tried to reach the farm. He turned back alive but the message was clear: even the act of replanting is not tolerated by the occupying forces.
Her mother has resettled in Cairo, alongside an estimated 200,000 fellow Gazans. She fills a small apartment with crockery and household goods she insists are “for when we go back to Gaza”: cups, plates, and utensils that cannot yet be used, because they belong to a future that does not exist. Dima and the children are in London, staying long enough for the boys to count as “home” students for university under British rules.
Dima is shy and intensely private. It took six days of persuasion before she agreed to sit in front of the camera; every morning she would say “tomorrow” and change her mind. What convinced her in the end, Khalidi says, was the thought that “this is not about me; it’s for Palestine.” Once she accepted that, she sat down and delivered long, lucid accounts of fear, anger and love. Her eyes remained wide, shining with a fragile intensity. She didn’t hide a very practical fear of being widowed by her husband’s work. But there’s also a quiet determination for the family to rearrange its life around the assumption that Ghassan must be able to leave for Gaza “at the drop of a hat”.
Through Dima and her father, the film links the latest destruction in Gaza to the longer history of dispossession since 1948. It is not simply a portrait of one doctor but a family chronicle of repeated uprooting, layered over the decades.
Gaza’s Health System Under a “Ceasefire”
Since October 2025, Gaza has officially been under a ceasefire brokered by the United States and regional powers. The World Health Organization welcomed the agreement but warned that “the health challenges ahead are immense,” with most hospitals damaged or destroyed and huge gaps in staff, supplies and basic infrastructure.
Three months on, and those warnings look understated. UN humanitarian reports describe a territory where more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since 2023, thousands more bodies remain under rubble, and hundreds have been killed by Israeli fire even after the ceasefire entered into force. Hospitals are still repeatedly attacked or forced to suspend critical services for lack of fuel, as at Al-Awda hospital in late December 2025.
The ceasefire has allowed more food to enter, and a recent global hunger assessment declared that Gaza is no longer formally in famine. But over 100,000 people remain in what experts call “catastrophic” conditions, and most of the Strip is still at emergency levels of acute food insecurity, especially among children and pregnant women.
In this context, the film’s hospital sequences -- some shot by Abu-Sittah himself, others drawn from agency footage -- already function as an early archive of a campaign that UN experts have since described as “medicide”: the deliberate destruction of a healthcare system. Abu-Sittah’s testimony to the International Criminal Court, which the film follows, is part of a larger struggle to force accountability for this strategy: attacks on hospitals, sieges, blockades of fuel and medicine, and the targeting of doctors who speak out.
A Witness Under Siege
For Abu-Sittah, the price of bearing witness has been personal as well as professional. A pro-Israel lawfare group attempted to force through a suspension of his licence because of social-media posts – a move rejected by the General Medical Council tribunal in the UK in August 2024. In 2025 he prevailed in a separate case before German courts contesting restrictions on his freedom of movement after he was barred from entering Germany and other Schengen countries to speak about Gaza.
Yet the campaigns against him continue. At the time of writing he faces a two-week medical tribunal hearing in Manchester, starting on 6 January 2026, part of what his supporters describe as legal action (the tenth) seeking to paint him as antisemitic and strip him of his right to practise or to work with charities.
Abu-Sittah now spends much of his time in Lebanon, operating on children evacuated from Gaza -- some thirty-five patients at the latest count -- while also serving as rector of Glasgow University, a largely honorary role that has itself become a lightning rod for attacks.
In our conversation, Mansour and Khalidi were blunt: “They are out to get him,” Khalidi said, listing dawn visits from British police, repeated refusals of permission to re-enter Gaza even on WHO or MSF missions, and the latest attempt to put him on trial for his speech rather than for any clinical act. At the same time, both women insisted that Abu-Sittah himself refuses to centre his own suffering. “He says he does not have the luxury not to be OK. It’s not about him; people are dying,” Mansour noted.
310 screenings in a single day - and critical silence
Since its world premiere at the Cairo International Film Festival in November 2024, where it won the Saad Eldin Wahba Award for Best Arabic Film, A State of Passion has circulated largely outside the commercial mainstream. It has screened at Geneva’s human rights film festival, the London Palestine Film Festival, SAFAR in the UK, Al Ard in Sardinia, the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival in Minneapolis, Pathé multiplexes in Tunisia, independent cinemas in France, and university campuses from Belgium to Brazil.
One initiative captures the scale. On 2 November 2025, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Film Lab coordinated a global day of screenings, offering the film free of charge. On that single day, A State of Passion was shown in 310 venues around the world, from small towns in India and Nepal to Curacao, Mombasa and South Korea. If we assume an average of only thirty viewers per screening, Khalidi calculates, that is nearly ten thousand people in one day; “the real figure was likely much higher”.
The directors estimate that requests now come in roughly evenly from three sources: festivals, NGOs and professional organisations, and grassroots activist networks. They try to say yes to all of them. Mansour speaks of freezing underground screenings in Berlin, packed rooms of young people in Britain, and long post-film discussions in which strangers line up not only to ask questions but to hug the filmmakers and ask, over and over, “What can we do?”
Medical students, in particular, have been shaken. “They come out saying: we wanted to do medicine for the money; now, seeing Ghassan, we realise there is something more than a lucrative career,” Mansour said. For Khalidi, who has spent years writing scientific reports few people read, the film’s impact is proof that documentary filmmaking can reach more people than policy papers: “Instead of writing a report that nobody reads, we make a film -- and everybody watches.” The directors are under no illusion, however: in mainstream European and US film media culture, the response has been largely silence. There are thoughtful pieces in niche outlets -- Geneva Solutions, the Chicago Reader, Arab and Italian press -- and listings on IMDb and specialist platforms. But there has been no serious coverage in the New York Times, no review in the major French or British dailies, no awards-season buzz. They are not alone in this: Khalidi points out that even a recent Oscar-winning film on Palestine struggled to secure a US distributor; in that light, A State of Passion’s near-absence from “prestige” critics’ columns or mainstream cinema circuits feels something akin to a pattern. Another recent documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which details killings and torture of health workers and the destruction of hospitals, was dropped by the BBC after being cleared for broadcast. It was only picked up by Channel 4 after public pressure and an open letter signed by hundreds of prominent figures. Films that place Palestinian suffering at the centre, and that challenge Western complicity in that suffering, still appear to struggle to find comfortable slots in the schedules of public broadcasters and major festival galas.
Remember Your Vows
If A State of Passion has an ideal audience, Mansour and Khalidi suggest, it is the hesitant professional: the medical student wondering what their degree is for; the hospital consultant who has watched the news with discomfort but not yet acted; the public-health bureaucrat who believes, or wants to believe, that health is somehow “above politics”. One small detail in our conversation stays with me. At the beginning of the war, around a hundred Israeli doctors signed an open letter urging the army to bomb Gaza hospitals, calling them “terrorist nests” and demanding the destruction of facilities such as Al-Shifa. For Khalidi, who has spent her life in health policy, the existence of such a letter is an obscene mirror showing that medicine itself has been conscripted into the conflict: people who once took an oath to do no harm can be persuaded to demand airstrikes on wards full of children.
Asked what message she would like A State of Passion to carry to French or British health workers, she answers simply: “Remember your vows. Stand up. Align your actions with these vows. Use your voice, your power, your collective.”
That is perhaps the deepest ambition of this quietly furious film. It does not offer the comfort of distance; it refuses to let Gaza become a closed chapter or a “conflict” safely contained in the past. Nor does it flatter the viewer with the illusion that watching alone is enough.
Mansour and Khalidi often say that if ten people leave a screening wanting to learn more, they have done something. Yet, that modest standard feels too low already. The film is being used in medical schools, in trade unions, in solidarity groups, and now -- remarkably -- in the chambers of a parliament whose government continues to arm and shield Israel diplomatically.
In thirty-five years’ time, if the legal and political landscape on Gaza has finally shifted, the directors would like their film to be remembered, they told me, as the one that “made me sit up and think… made me do something, get involved.”
For now, in a world that still treats Palestinian lives as expendable and Palestinian stories as optional, A State of Passion is a necessary inconvenience. It documents a genocide as it unfolds, insists on the humanity of those who resist it, and calmly asks viewers - doctors, students, politicians, critics - whether they intend to live up to their own professions’ promises.