Rami Younis is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, journalist and activist from Lyd, Palestine. He was a 2019-20 Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. As a journalist, he mainly wrote for the online magazine +972 and served as both writer and editor of its Hebrew sister site, “local call”, a journalistic project he co-founded, designed to challenge Israeli mainstream journalism outlets.
Rami served as a parliamentary consultant and media spokesperson for Palestinian Knesset (Israeli parliament) member Haneen Zoabi. Rami is also co-founder and manager of the first ever “Palestine Music Expo”, an event that connects the local Palestinian music scene to the worldwide industry. Younis was the host of the Arabic-language daily news show, “On the Other Hand.”

Sarah Ema Friedland is a documentary filmmaker and media artist based in New York. Friedland’s works have been screened widely in the US and abroad and have been broadcast nationally on PBS. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Newman Foundation, the Ford Foundation, NYSCA, the LABA House of Study, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the MacDowell Colony.
She is a recipient of the 2014 Paul Robeson award from the Newark Museum and was nominated for a New York Emmy. Friedland is the Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College and an active member of the Meerkat Media Collective.

The sci-fi documentary Lyd portrays past, present and future scenarios of the city of Lyd, also known as Al-Lyd, Lydd, Lod, or the city that once "connected Palestine to the world". If the first Zionist manifestos propagated that Palestine is nothing but a wasteland or "A land without a people for a people without a land", this documentary film comes to prove the opposite. Lyd is personified through the voice of a woman telling her story. Conversing with Saint George and his passions, she guides us through the once thriving city with a history of five thousand years until the Israeli occupation of 1948 and its current form within Palestine/Israel, posing the question: How would the life of the city and its inhabitants have evolved if the Nakba had never happened? Thus a parallel reality unfolds in the form of animation, where the same characters live free from traumas of the past and the violence of the present. The fictional Lyd emerges through the time and space of a familiar place forged on the one hand through a material - topographical reality and on the other hand through loss. A mythical element runs through a series of narratives, archival material, personal oral testimonies of survivors of the Israeli occupation, the memories and experiences of West Bank exiles and current residents of the city. This film introduces us to the myths and traumas of the city, prompting us to question the prevailing scenarios and what the future of Palestine will be.

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Aliki Arvaniti

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The texts have been produced by the network Filmmakers for Palestine gr.
*We consider Filmmakers to be every person who designs, implements, analyzes and teaches cinema: from editors to assistant directors, from lighting technicians to film critics, from viewers to programmers. A film is created by every gaze that shapes it.

Editing & Translation Team: Sofia Grigoriadou, Christina Phoebe, Maximillien Luc Proctor, Sophia Thomopoulos