Three Promises: Palestinian director Yousef Srouji on the power of amateur video during war and occupation

Like many millennials, Yousef Srouji had a box of home videos from his childhood that was collecting dust. But in the winter of 2017, he brushed the cobwebs away and pressed play, travelling back in time to a part of his childhood that he and his family had locked up: war and Israeli occupation in the West Bank, more specifically, hours and hours of footage of his family’s home life during the Second Intifada.

Yousef quickly realised he was sitting on something special and powerful for himself and a wider audience.

“I felt an obligation to share our videos,” Yousef tells The New Arab. “Palestinian voices are not given enough time and weight in mainstream media. Even as victims of war, we very rarely get to see what it's like for them on a daily level, a personal and intimate level, and in a way that humanises them.”

Fast-forward seven years, and Yousef has turned his unique archive into a moving and poignant documentary, Three Promises.

"The role of archival footage in maintaining a record and an unbiased narrative is extremely important because during times of war we see how the more powerful side tends to dominate the story while the rest have to struggle, even just to keep a little bit of theirs"

Released in 2023, it has featured at over 10 international film festivals worldwide, garnering significant acclaim and several awards, including Best International Documentary Film at DocPoint 2024. 

Three Promises is the story of a mother and her camera, of a son and his suppressed memories, and of an entire country. In the early 2000s, while the Israeli army was repelling the Second Intifada, Suha (Yousef’s mother) started filming life at home under siege, punctuated by frequent trips to the basement where she and her husband and two children took shelter.

Beyond their visible fear and anguish, Suha’s videos capture touching moments of humour and care, as well as the banality of life paralysed by war.

At three points of intense danger, Suha promises God that she and her family will leave if they survive. After the third time, they finally do, fleeing Palestine for good.

Watching Suha’s videos leaves the audience wondering (much like Yousef did in 2017) what drove her to record her family's hardship and trauma, her children’s stolen childhood, and why it took her so long to flee the country, burdened as she was between hopes of peace and the emotional distress of becoming a refugee.

Blending the voice of the present with the camcorder footage, Yousef completes the story begun by Suha, thereby averting the act of forgetting, both personal and collective.

A record of Gaza’s devastation

Three Promises was released some months before October 7, 2023, but has taken on even more importance and poignancy as the world watches the ongoing horrors of Israel’s assault via professional and amateur video.

“What happened to my family was one thing, but what's happening to Gazans is another,” says Yousef.

“Over the last year, we've seen a genocide being live streamed, whilst simultaneously witnessing the Israeli occupation try their best to suppress any type of journalism and footage that's coming out of Gaza and southern Lebanon.”

Attacked in the field, office, and at home, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza over the past year than any other conflict over the past three decades, according to data by the Committee to Protect Journalists – with at least 128 media workers killed between 7 October 2023 and 4 October 2024.

"I wanted to showcase a lived experience: an intimate insight into a family of four living in war zones, specifically Palestine. And I like to think that, if you're watching a story about a family going through a really hard period, even if you’re a Zionist you'd have a hard time dismissing it and not finding empathy"

Consequently, the role of amateur phone recordings and informal journalism has grown enormously, becoming, in fact, the essential medium through which Gazans are sharing and recounting their victimisation to the outside world.

These videos have definitely “impacted things politically and helped move people around the world to the streets to protest,” says Yousef. “But I also think it’s made many people desensitised and, one year on, it feels like what's happening now in Palestine is having less of an impact than it did a year ago.”

As a result, Yousef believes that the next round of value has yet to come from Gazans’ homemade videos, as well as from the West Bank and Lebanon.

“Like with Three Promises, I imagine that, once we give people the space to think about what they have captured, and then put it together in a way that creates intimacy and understanding, that's when we’ll see the next wave of power and value from all this footage.”

Creating a public archive

Yousef’s message to people in Palestine and Lebanon who are sitting on amateur videos and debating whether they should share it is: share it.

“My process of making the film has helped me personally heal a lot and find nuances in my experience that I had overlooked. It made me understand myself better, and my family better. The bonus is that I get to share it with the world and open their minds up a little bit too. So my recommendation to people is to work on it, at the very least for themselves.”

There is also the fact that, while terabytes of video and photography are coming out of Palestine and Lebanon, their existence should never be taken for granted.

“The role of archival footage in maintaining a record and an unbiased narrative is extremely important because, during times of war, in particular, we see how the more powerful side tends to dominate the story while the rest have to struggle, even just to keep a little bit of theirs,” said Yousef.

Yousef and his team discovered how difficult it is to find archival (and news) footage from the Second Intifada while making the documentary. 

“We spent months looking and there was just so little. It was surprising. In the end, we had maybe 30 minutes in total between AP, the French press and Al-Jazeera,” he says.

“Back then it was mostly just Al-Jazeera Arabic that was filming, and their records were in Gaza and were destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 2008 (before they were digitised).”

In an era of ever-growing AI and cyber crime manipulation, how might Palestinians’ archival footage from the present day get deleted or suppressed in the future?

"My mum is an amazing mother. She can hold the camera and be an amazing mother at the same time. It's not either or. She felt obliged to record what we were going through – and now I completely understand why” 

While Yousef found archival videos in the end, he decided to leave Three Promises largely free from external content or, for that matter, much editorialisation, opting instead to let his mother’s video work speak for itself.

“I didn't want to hold peoples’ hand and add any politics beyond what it already had. It didn't have to be a historical, educational documentary," he tells The New Arab.

"I wanted to showcase a lived experience: an intimate insight into a family of four living in war zones, specifically Palestine. And I like to think that, if you're watching a story about a family going through a really hard period, even if you’re a Zionist you'd have a hard time dismissing it and not finding empathy,” Yousef shares.

At a recent London screening and Q&A with Yousef and his sister, members of the audience asked the siblings whether they resented their mother for filming the family during a time of acute distress.

“I've been asked this question a lot over the last year and a half. The first time I heard it I was flabbergasted. My mum is an amazing mother. She can hold the camera and be an amazing mother at the same time. It's not either or. She felt obliged to record what we were going through – and now I completely understand why,” concludes Yousef.

Three Promises is available for streaming on Shahid and can also be found at a number of upcoming screenings, as per the documentary's Instagram page and website.

Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman

Follow him on X: @seblebanon