There is no Palestinian cinematic tradition. But many documentary-style films are made, mostly for foreign broadcast. Edward Fox finds that, despite the odd lapse into cliche, they do more than scratch the surface

The inevitable problem with any initiative such as the series of Palestinian films to be shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts is that it is in danger of appealing exclusively to convinced and active supporters of the Palestinian cause, the hard core of (Edward) Saido-masochists who have direct experience of the country and of the Israel-Palestine conflict and will turn out for events in aid of Palestine more out of political commitment than cultural curiosity. Such events, in London at least, too often simply offer all those present the chance to nod their heads unanimously and vigorously in agreement about things they already know, while offering little new or genuinely stimulating content.

Palestine at the Pictures, for all that, is an important contribution to the question of how Palestine is represented on screen. In general, it shows how the spread of relatively inexpensive digital movie cameras has made it possible to create quickly made, urgently paced reports from the front: rough, crude even, but totally different from the stultifyingly conventionalised form in which the conflict is reported to us daily on television news broadcasts.

This is Palestinian cinema, and it is made entirely for export. There are no Palestinian "movies" like the soapy Arabic romances churned out by the Cairo dream-factories - only acts of cinematic guerrilla warfare. These newer films in Palestine at the Pictures are documentaries made with an eye to broadcast on foreign television stations. Inside Palestine, cinema barely exists; one can only just say with certainty that there is "a" cinema: the al-Qassaba in Ramallah, a cheerful downtown fleapit, which this month was showing the likes of Titanic and Billy Elliot.

Everything in Palestinian life is political, because it is saturated with the daily realities of the conflict and with the struggle for survival. But although this means there is little scope for the luxury of fiction in Palestinian film, it doesn't mean that the personality of the film-maker must be eliminated. One sees this in the two films by the Jerusalem-based Sobhi al-Zobaidi, Looking Awry and Light at the End of the Tunnel, both low-budget videos financed by a patchwork of grants from foreign governments and aid agencies. The first is a simple fable about a Palestinian film director - al-Zobaidi himself - who is commissioned by a well-meaning but naive American producer to make a documentary about Jerusalem that emphasises "positive images" of the city. "It's not good always to be focusing on the negative," the producer says, ploughing into the cliche of how marvellous it is to find a city that has mosques, synagogues and churches in close proximity.

Once production begins, reality immediately intrudes. Filming touristy scenes at the Damascus Gate at the walls of the Old City, he captures a soldier shooting at running children. The producer tells him to remove the footage. "How can you show Jerusalem without the intifada?" he argues. Then Ariel Sharon, just before he became prime minister, makes the fateful visit to the Temple Mount that sparked the renewed uprising, and film of this provocative stunt is inserted seamlessly into the narrative; the theatrical violence of the episode, played out on the sunlit stage of the ancient Herodian platform, is shocking. With this, the American's plan for a film of "positive" images falls apart, and the director calls the producer on his mobile phone to resign from the project. "The film you want is a fiction film," he says. The movie has a home-made feel and is amateurishly acted, but bumbles along with a charming sweetness and humour.

Looking Awry is both short and as light a film about life under occupation as it is possible to conceive; Light at the End of the Tunnel takes a more serious approach, dealing with the neglected but important social issue of how the half-million Palestinians who have spent time in Israeli prisons adjust to life outside after their release. The detention of such a large percentage of the population, often under the draconian rule (inherited from the British) of administrative detention, whereby a person can be held without charge for six months, is one of the heaviest burdens on Palestinian society, impoverishing families by removing their main breadwinner, damaging emotional bonds within families, and turning individuals into people who find it nearly impossible to resume a normal life. In this film, former prisoners tell their own stories, without elaboration or commentary, with heart-rending effect. Palestinians tend to assume a controlled and dignified demeanour when speaking publicly, even when talking of terrible personal experiences, and the graceful restraint of the film's interviewees enhances the poignancy of their testimony. It would be good to see this on Channel 4.

One of the punchiest films in the series is Scratching the Surface by Charlotte Player. Using what seems like nothing more than a high-street digital camera, this 18-year-old British student went to Jerusalem in April this year with the simple idea of capturing a single glimpse of the place, without bringing to the subject any preconception at all. In most observers, the idea of approaching without bias a subject so laden with historical and cultural baggage would be disingenuous at best, but Player's youth and nationality convincingly qualify her. Technically, Scratching the Surface is barely a rung above the level of a home movie, yet it communicates very powerfully and directly, with a ragged collage of scenes and interviews. Player's apparent innocence was clearly an asset in opening doors that would be closed to the mainstream media: she succeeded in persuading a group of young Israeli soldiers to give her their candid - and, shall we say, regrettable - views on the current round of violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict. "The Arabs say we started it, and we say they started it, but really we are right because we are the good guys," a soldier explains concisely.

Unlike most of the other films in the series, which are couched in the idiom of documentary, there is one that attempts to relate Palestinian experience through metaphor and a deliberately artificial style. Cyber Palestine is a short film (16 minutes) by Elia Suleiman that retells the biblical narrative of Mary and Joseph's flight to Bethlehem as the story of a young couple trying to get out of the sealed-off Palestinian territory of Gaza. The Palestinians' predicament in the past century is entirely due to the religious significance of the landscape they inhabit, yet Palestinians rarely refer to this religious symbolism. Instead, they have tended to address the world through urgency, realism and polemic. But this film, by the Paris-based Suleiman, mines this rich lode of meaning. It is surprisingly fresh and successful in the way it applies biblical symbolism to the Palestinian experiences of exile and oppression, though the lack of dialogue sometimes makes one wonder what exactly is going on.

Not all these films are totally successful. Mai Masri's Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, about two teenage girls from refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank who make friends through letter-writing, appeals very hard for sympathy by showing us sweetness amid adversity, but lapses into many of the Palestinians' own public-relations cliches, such as showing us one of the girls dancing in a nostalgic folk-dance troupe. This mood changes unexpectedly about halfway through, when they find themselves caught up in the violence of the current intifada. The dancing girl writes to her friend that, in a demonstration in which Israeli soldiers shot at protesters, she saw a friend's blood and flesh spattered on a wall. What starts like an educational film for teenagers ends in harrowing scenes of traumatised kids weeping over dead classmates; the effect is very strange and unsettling.

Most of these films were shown earlier this year at an Arab film festival in the Gulf state of Qatar, sponsored by the ground-breaking TV station al-Jazira, an organisation that has been leading the way in broadcasting uncensored and politically frank reports about current affairs in the Middle East.

Palestine at the Pictures is at the ICA, London SW1 (020 7930 3647), from 28 September-4 October

Edward Fox's Palestine Twilight: the murder of Dr Albert Glock and the archaeology of the holy land is published by HarperCollins (£19.99)

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