A mysterious entity moves through Jerusalem, taking memories rather than lives. Around a young man named Karim, the people he loves begin to lose their hold on what they know, and he must save his family before the erasure is complete. This is the unsettling premise of Rola Selbak's The Visitor, a Palestinian horror film in which home, memory and occupation cannot be separated from the supernatural. The terror comes from encountering a monster and watching the intimate evidence of a people's existence disappear.
The premise also names a wider danger. Palestinian stories have repeatedly been extracted, distorted or made conditional on institutional approval. Hollywood's power has depended on deciding which stories reach the screen and controlling the practical knowledge behind them: how to develop and pitch a script, find producers and raise money. But those gates are not the only entrance.
Selbak's answer takes two connected forms. The Visitor claims the freedom to tell a culturally specific Palestinian story without softening its politics or turning trauma into spectacle. Safina Filmmaker Project gives other Palestinians access to filmmaking knowledge without requiring them to pass through Hollywood first. Together, they reject the need for permission. Palestinian filmmakers can tell stories through their own folklore, demand excellence from their work and share what they know, so that no filmmaker mistakes exclusion for a lack of possibility.
Together, they reject the need for permission.
In The Visitor, occupation is scarier than folklore
Karim lives in Jerusalem, where a mysterious entity is erasing the memories of those around him. His attempt to save his family gives The Visitor its narrative urgency, but the film's central proposition is sharper: "life under an occupation is scarier than the monsters in our folk tales." That idea changes the function of horror. The supernatural offers no escape from political reality. Instead, it provides a language for confronting the fear of being displaced, replaced and severed from the memories that make a home familiar.
The supernatural offers no escape from political reality.
Selbak finished the script at the beginning of January 2023, after events in Sheikh Jarrah made her feel that she was reliving what had happened to her teta and her family. Watching families being thrown out of their houses carried a terrible clarity. Imagine someone arriving, taking your home and insisting that your relationship to it can simply be removed. In The Visitor, memory erasure is not an abstract device laid over Palestinian life. It gives horror form to a question already embedded in that life: how do people fight disappearance when the assault reaches beyond property and into what they remember?
Selbak had often worked in realism and character drama, but realism risked making this story feel like a documentary or encouraging the familiar ritual of tiptoeing around the subject. She wanted something bold and compelling that could reach Palestinian and worldwide audiences without making Palestinian trauma an object of consumption. The project had not yet been shot at the time of the conversation, and the plan was to film in Jordan early the following year, inshallah. The Visitor was not a finished accomplishment. It was a film being built on terms its maker had chosen.
Palestinian folk tales offer more than familiar jinn stories
Palestinian folklore gives The Visitor more than atmosphere. It lets the film reject the assumption that Arab supernatural storytelling must be reduced to jinn. Selbak wants to reach deeper into a culture whose folk tales have rarely appeared on screen, though they remain present in speech, family memory and the distinct traditions of villages and areas. Recognition by outsiders should not determine which Palestinian beings are allowed to appear.
The Rune shows how local these traditions can be. In one village, the figure may be mischievous; elsewhere, evil; in another telling, benevolent enough to grant children in exchange for jewelry. The variations resist a single authorized version. They also survive in ordinary family language. Haneen remembered her mother telling her that unbrushed hair made her look like a Rune, a phrase so familiar that she had never considered the figure a "real" part of folklore. The story was already living in the home before anyone thought to put it on a screen.
Reclamation also extends to language. Selbak points to the English word "ghoul," taken from the Arabic "ghoul," and responds with playful directness: it can be taken back. Yet folklore is not decorative cultural detail attached to the film to certify its Palestinian identity. It is the structure through which The Visitor approaches memories being erased without reproducing Palestinian suffering as spectacle. The monster creates distance, but not evasion. The folk tale allows a direct look at an experience that realism might flatten into evidence. Culture does not decorate the horror; it determines what the horror means.
Culture does not decorate the horror; it determines what the horror means.
After CAA, Selbak rejected Hollywood's terms of entry
Being dropped by CAA clarified something Selbak had already encountered in the work offered to her: Hollywood had not merely rejected Palestinians; it had villainized them. One project made the bargain unusually plain. It was set in Israel, and its producers wanted a Palestinian writer in the room to focus on a Palestinian terrorist, the terrorist's wife and his son, who was uncertain whether he wanted to become a terrorist. The approach began with flattery. These people "really" wanted her because she was Palestinian, as though employing her could neutralize what they wanted her identity to authenticate.
A familiar argument favors accepting such work: enter the room, humanize the characters and improve the portrayal from within. Selbak refused. Adding sympathetic shading would not change the premise or interrupt the story factory producing it. It would give that factory a Palestinian signature. Her standard is not that every Palestinian character must be virtuous, or that Palestinians should be protected from complexity. Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and brown people should not be asked to validate portrayals that are false to them. If Hollywood insists on making those stories, it should no longer expect the people being distorted to provide authenticity.
The Visitor offers a material alternative. Its Palestinian talent comes from al-Utz, the diaspora, Gaza and inside historic Palestine 48. These artists are working together as makers of their own film, not as consultants brought in to approve someone else's framing. This is what follows the refusal of tokenization: a reorganization of who holds creative authority, rather than a withdrawal from filmmaking. The question is no longer whether Hollywood will finally permit Palestinians to shine on screen. It is what Palestinian artists can make when they stop organizing their ambitions around that permission.
Watermelon Pictures backs excellence, not a charity case
Watermelon Pictures mattered to Selbak before an official agreement existed. Its team had access to an early draft while the project was still private, and Munir Mudin Abdullah offered notes that helped strengthen the script. The company backed The Visitor during development rather than arriving only when the project was ready to be announced. Two months before the conversation, Watermelon Pictures signed the official executive producer deal, formalizing a relationship that had already continued throughout the film's development.
That support matters partly because Watermelon Pictures understands both the creative and business sides of filmmaking. Selbak does not want Palestinian films treated as charity cases or greenlit merely because they address a particular topic. Such lowered expectations would create another kind of confinement, one in which political importance excuses weak craft and sympathy becomes the measure of Palestinian work rather than what it achieves as cinema. The demand is more exacting: Palestinian filmmakers should be held to a high standard, and their films should be excellent, just as other international films are expected to be excellent.
Creative notes can strengthen a script, but infrastructure must also help bring a film into the world. That requires an understanding of how a project reaches audiences and what kind of experience can form around it. Palestinian screenings already suggest a model beyond passive consumption: people gather, watch and speak with one another, sometimes meeting filmmakers through conversations and Q&As. Viewers do not simply sit, consume and leave. The film continues through the questions and relationships in the room. A Palestinian film ecosystem must support production as well as the communities that give viewing its meaning.
A Palestinian film ecosystem must support production as well as the communities that give viewing its meaning.
Safina frees the knowledge Hollywood keeps behind its gates
Safina Filmmaker Project, founded by Selbak in 2024, is the practical counterpart to her rejection of Hollywood's terms. It is a free initiative for Palestinian filmmakers, built around artistic mentorship and the belief that professional knowledge should circulate rather than remain guarded. Safina offers workshops in writing, directing and animation, along with professional script analysis and feedback. This is specific, practical help, not a vague gesture of encouragement. It addresses the stages at which a filmmaker needs informed attention, from shaping a script to understanding the demands of a chosen form.
The fellowship launched in the year of the conversation expanded that work to five Palestinian filmmakers from the diaspora and Al-Dakhil, 48. They receive mentorship and a cash award to help make their films, combining creative guidance with material support. The name Safina means boat or ship, and Selbak uses it to describe filmmakers lifting one another up and learning from one another. The image rejects the idea that Palestinian artists must compete for one scarce place inside someone else's institution. The boat moves because the people aboard share what they know.
Selbak calls this "liberating the knowledge." How do filmmakers make and pitch a film? How do they find a producer or raise funds? Hollywood has reinforced its authority by making these processes seem mysterious, as though access proved exceptional selection rather than information being withheld. Safina shares the lessons Selbak wishes someone had given her when she was coming up. The Visitor and Safina are parts of the same refusal. One creates a Palestinian film without asking Hollywood to define its story; the other helps more Palestinian filmmakers learn how to create theirs. Permission carries less force when filmmakers possess the craft, standards and practical knowledge themselves.