Chronicles from the Siege

Abdallah Al-Khatib made Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege) in 2021 from footage he shot himself while living through the siege of the Yarmouk camp in Damascus; it went to Cannes' ACID sidebar and became one of the defining documents of the Syrian war. Chronicles from the Siege is his first fiction feature, and it won the GWFF Best First Feature Award at the 2026 Berlinale from the main competition.

The film follows a handful of people inside a city under siege as they work out the logistics of continuing to exist: where food comes from, which streets the snipers cover, who is looking after whom. Al-Khatib films this at close range and at the pace of the day rather than the crisis, so that the extraordinary conditions register as routine — which is, of course, the point about sieges.

Made as an Algerian-French-Palestinian co-production, it belongs to the strand of recent European-financed cinema that has taken the wars at the continent's edges as its subject without exoticising them. The moral choices the characters face are presented as choices, not as illustrations, and the film asks the viewer to sit inside them rather than judge from outside.