‘Epicly Palestine’d’ + ‘EXIST’ At LPFF

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona via Unsplash

London Palestinian Film Festival returns to London, exploring the history, depth, urgency and unknown parts of Palestinian life and cinema. Epicly Palestine’d (2015) and EXIST (2025) form a conversation across time. Two films filmed nearly a decade apart, documenting the same fragile miracle: the emergence of skateboarding in Palestine, not as just a hobby, but as a language of resistance, identity, and breath. These are not sports films. They are not about scores, or podiums, or glory. They are about presence. To watch Epicly Palestine’d (2015) and EXIST (2025) back-to-back is to witness not just the growth of a sport, but the slow, stubborn unfolding of a human need: the need to move, to belong, and to be seen. They document this phenomenon not as a mere hobby or an imported sport, but as an organic, indigenous language of selfhood, resistance, and the fundamental human need for breath and autonomy.

Epicly Palestine’d begins in rough textures and shaky frames, this docufilm filmed mostly on phones, with no budget or infrastructure. Its aesthetic becomes inseparable from its conditions. There are no polished sequences, no dramatic score guiding the emotion; instead, there are hands on battered boards, scraped knees, tentative smiles and repeated falls. A small group of teenagers, with no blueprint and no outside permission, invent a culture in a place that was never designed for them to feel free. They skate on broken ground, in half-finished spaces, on streets that feel both familiar and unsafe. The camera doesn’t search for spectacle; it lingers on process.

What emerges is not a story about ollies and kickflips, but about the quiet reshaping of identity. In a landscape defined by restrictions, checkpoints, and surveillance, something as simple as rolling forward becomes charged with meaning. Skateboarding turns into autonomy, a privileged freedom. There isn’t a blueprint for what the boys are doing, they move forward without permission or a plan. They are simply inventing a culture where none previously existed. In this sense, the film resists the conventions of the sports documentary. It is not a catalogue of tricks or a celebration of technical skill. The camera rarely searches for spectacle. Instead, it lingers on process: the attempt, the failure, the patience required to try again. The act of rolling forward becomes the central gesture, and in a context defined by checkpoints, surveillance, and spatial restriction, that gesture becomes quietly radical.

This is not a story of rebellion as performance, but a story of identity under construction. In a place where so much of life is externally defined by occupation, by borders, by permissions, skateboarding becomes a space of self-definition. The boys are not “performing” resistance. They are not consciously staging defiance for the camera. They are, quite simply, trying to feel what it is like to move freely in their own bodies.

There is a tenderness to this film that feels almost accidental. They do not speak in slogans. They do not frame their actions as political. And yet, everything about the act is political: the choosing of joy, the building of community, the claiming of space.

When EXIST arrives almost ten years later, the tone shifts, but the spirit remains intact. The camera is steadier now, the images more composed, more deliberate. But the world it documents feels heavier. This film follows Aram Sabbah in the weeks leading up to the Olympic qualifiers in Dubai, and although it is framed through the lens of competition, it is anything but a conventional sports documentary. What it captures is not ambition in the usual sense, but burden. Aram moves through training sessions, airports, unfamiliar cities, and quiet hotel rooms with the weight of something invisible sitting in his chest. He carries with him the memory of the boys in the first film, the scarcity of space, the sound of cheap wheels on cracked pavement. His skating now is not only his own; it feels inherited, communal, historical.

The film’s power lives in its restraint. It lingers on the in-between moments: the tightening of shoelaces, the silent stare before a run, the way he touches his board as if checking that it still exists. The title EXIST does not feel symbolic, it feels almost literal and urgent. Aram himself voices the profound meaning of his journey. He expresses a disinterest in conventional winning; what matters, he stresses, is the moment when his name is called out alongside Palestine’s. It is a desperate, fundamental desire to be undeniable. In a global context where Palestine is routinely flattened into a crisis headline or actively erased into an abstraction, Aram’s physical presence in that highly visible international arena becomes a potent form of quiet, articulate refusal. This act of simply showing up and demanding acknowledgment is radically political; it transforms personal visibility into resistance.

Occupation, violence, and restriction isn’t presented through graphic imagery or explanatory monologues. Instead, they live in what is absent: the lack of space, the lack of resources, the long pauses, the sense of tension under ordinary moments.

The talk that followed, hosted by Manal Massalha, featured Nora Lagström Jebara, Theo Krish and Viktor Telegin. Theo discuses how skateboarding is used as a tool to push Palestinian discourse. We see this in the film as well. Aram’s candid reflection captures the profound, internal ethical struggle: to step onto a skateboard is to feel joy, a privileged and deeply human emotion. The guilt of this feeling in the face of collective suffering is what he struggles to reconcile. The films do not resolve this tension neatly. They allow it to sit uncomfortably. Yet they also suggest a counter-logic: that joy itself can be political, that movement can be a form of resistance rather than a denial of reality. Skateboarding, rooted in play, balance, and failure, becomes not an escape from hardship, but a language through which hardship is navigated.

Yet, the films ultimately present the hopeful counter-argument: to use skateboarding, an activity rooted in pure joy, movement, and community, not just to represent Palestine, but to act as a durable, beautiful, and highly visible form of resistance.

The existence and evolution of the scene documented in both films is inseparable from the work of SkatePal, a UK-based non-profit founded in 2013. SkatePal’s intervention is not merely logistical; it is a critical, socio-political act that lays the concrete foundation for emotional and physical liberation.

Together, Epicly Palestine’d and EXIST offer something of hope, especially to Palestinian youth. He shows that both happiness and resistance are able to live in the same space and perhaps even foster each other. These films show us that even in the most confined places, people will still find ways to move.

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Edited by Hannah Tang, Co-Editor of Film & TV