Our Small Houses

Synopsis

Iraqi writer and director Kassem Hawal’s 24 minute film Our Small Houses is one of the few surviving works made by the cinema group Hawal founded and led under the Central Information Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Badly damaged and often overlooked in histories of revolutionary film, it combines lucid Marxist-Leninist analyses with striking montage techniques.

Director Biography

Kassem Hawal is an award winning Iraqi director currently based in the Netherlands. He was born in 1940 in Al Basra, Iraq. He studied theater acting and directing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. He left Iraq in 1970 and traveled to Lebanon and Syria, where he focused on the making of political films. He has also worked on films by the PLO. He directed 28 documentaries and five features.