Audiences love a feel-good story. The 2011 documentary Cinema Jenin: The Story of a Dream had good feelings in spades, featuring German activist and filmmaker Marcus Vetter stopping at nothing to revive a once-beloved cinema in a small town in the occupied West Bank and bring culture back to the dispossessed. In his years-long journey, he brought in foreign experts from his homeland to train the local population and, in the end, awarded them each for their humanitarian contributions, as local political figures stopped for a photo opportunity.
But as those cameras were flashing and plaques were handed out to scattered applause, Hussein Darbi, Cinema Jenin's true backbone for decades, was left watching from afar. He was, in the view of the foreign activists, an inconvenience.
He had the gall to insist that he knew better, because he did, and the gumption to insist he be paid for his services, because he would go hungry without them. He lived in a town where people struggled to find bread each day and his hands bore the callouses from years of coaxing ancient projectors back to life, but he never complained. All he cared about, 40 years after he first started working at the Palestinian cinema as a teenager, was proving that the place to which he had tied his soul still needed him too.
Palestinian filmmaker Alex Bakri was an assistant on that film, hired to make a documentary about the making of the documentary, and as he shot the proceedings his camera kept finding the cinema's then-59-year-old projectionist, who walked with a slight limp and spoke confidently and curtly through a slight speech impediment. Try to cast him in a million years and you would never find his like – Hussein was one in a billion, and Bakri knew it. While he was largely relegated to the background of the final film, Bakri knew his story needed to be told.
And it is a story heightened with more suspense than you might expect. Early on, as the nails are removed from the boarded-up cinema, the abandoned projector is found inside. Hussein is the only one who believes that it may still have life in it. For days, he tinkers with it, until he realises he will fail without an obsolete carbon rod. Undeterred, he presses on, travelling across the West Bank to its old cinemas and the homes of retired projectionists, until he finally finds someone who knows someone who may be able to help him.
Cinema is built on eureka moments – from Chuck Noland making fire in Cast Away to the engineers making a square peg fit a round hole in Apollo 13. This one is as moving as any. The light flickers on to the screen, the images start to move, and we see as clear as day that Hussein has worked a miracle.
But his brilliance goes unnoticed at best and is resented at worst. He ruins the narrative of the foreign activists. How can they impart their wisdom to the locals if Hussein can teach them better? How can they save the day if he is the one with the solutions? In between their constant comments of condescension towards the Palestinians they claim to care so much about, the foreign activists repeat again and again that they are doing this for the community. Whoever they are referring to seems to live largely in their imaginations.
They repeatedly sideline Hussein, but when a crisis hits, he is the person they call. Near the finish line, a day comes when there is a problem that even his intuition, developed through decades of toil, cannot immediately solve – a new projector has arrived without lenses. Once again, he is undeterred, finding someone on the other side of an Israeli checkpoint who has what he needs. But the bureaucracy proves too great a challenge for him to surmount and, in the film’s most heartbreaking shot, Hussein is turned away. The Germans order a lens themselves and pat themselves on the back for saving the day.
Working with limited funds, Bakri spent years editing the story, and every time he finished a scene, he would show it to Hussein, who would sometimes add bits of commentary that play as a voice-over. But the process took so long that, by the time the cinema was demolished to make way for a shopping centre in 2016, the film still was not done.
The last shot shows Hussein standing in its ruins, lamenting the loss of his life’s purpose. Two months later, he was dead.
There may be only one Hussein, but there are also millions of him – people who work tirelessly with dignity, caring only about a job well done and serving their community, many of whom are mistreated by those who think they must know better. But we’ll rarely hear their stories – not as long as there are crusading filmmakers more interested in self-aggrandisement.
There are those who may find Hussein's story too depressing to engage with. It thus may never find the audience that its predecessor did. Most of us, after a long day, just want to watch something that feels good and reassures us that everything is going to be all right. But sometimes accepting that reassurance is the least human thing we can do.
Searching for the true soul of a story may be harder and more painful, but it is infinitely more rewarding. For as long as I live, I would rather get to know a million Husseins on screen than watch another Vetter make himself the hero.
Habibi Hussein is screening at the Amman International Film Festival 2026
