16/09/2026
New documentary on Edward Said
For anyone interested in what shaped Said as a man, a critic, an activist, and intellectual, Edward Said: Between Worlds offers a superb introduction. Assembled from hundreds of hours of interviews and media appearances, and told entirely in Said’s own voice, the film depicts him in all his contradictory splendor: the elegantly coiffed and perfectly tailored tribune of an oppressed people, the man of the left who proclaimed, “I seem to be the father of identity politics, but it’s a thing I totally disbelieve in,” unfashionably tenacious in his defense of humanism and cultural autonomy, yet utterly intransigent when it comes to Palestinian rights.
That intransigence is crucial; the Palestinian cause would never have survived without it. But Said also argued that defiance alone, however essential, was not enough. His early complaint that “we have no narrative as a people,” the lack of academic attention to the Palestinian past, has been handsomely remedied by Nur Masalha, Rashid Khalidi (the Edward Said Professor Emeritus at Columbia), and other historians. However, the question of a Palestinian future has become even more fraught in the years since his death. And here the film offers two propositions, neither of them destined for universal assent. Read more from D.D. Guttenplan: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/edward-said-documentary-palestine/
