Yaqub's book helps to recover a period of revolutionary activity whose hopes and promises have been left unfulfilled.
~Film Quarterly
[Yaqub's] message of maintaining artistic archives at risk of marginalization (or worse, total extinction) should resonate with anyone who appreciates the crucial interconnections between film and cultural identity.
~Film International Online
Yaqub's is the first book devoted to this topic, certainly a reason in itself to welcome her study into the field of studies on Palestinian film...Yaqub does not exaggerate the quality of these films; nonetheless she sees past their limitations, exacerbated by the disappearance of so many of them, to their artistic and experimental merits and, most importantly, parses out their lasting importance for Palestinians today and for the present-day filmmakers who draw on them and draw inspiration from them.
~Critical Inquiry
[An] important, comprehensive study…[Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution] opens a window to a luminous period of revolutionary production that, until now, has been largely inaccessible to English-language readers, and invites reengagement with these vital, visionary works in a moment where inspiration is urgently needed.
~International Journal of Middle East Studies
Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution delves into the political dynamics of Palestinian film...One striking aspect of Yaqub's study is the importance of collective memory and oral history in the Palestinian context.
~The New Arab
[An] indispensable volume...Yaqub has gone to the painstaking effort to piece together what remains of these films, whether physically or simply from the memories of those who made them. Indeed, at a certain point it becomes difficult to see the author's effort to preserve an aspect of ever-threatened Palestinian history as different, or any less revolutionary, than the efforts of the film-makers she discusses in her book.
~Al Jadid
[Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution] offers an extraordinarily well-researched, thorough, and nuanced historical account of a period of cultural production that is important to revisit today. Yaqub’s approach has the great merit of examining Palestinian revolutionary cinema in its social context and on its own terms. At the same time, it admirably sets Palestinian filmmakers’ goals in relation to militant cinemas addressing similar questions around the world. Thereby, her book addresses cinema of revolutionary times, exploring what it can tell us about filmmaking in the days of revolution past and to come, here and elsewhere.
~Journal of Palestine Studies
Yaqub’s book brings to light an immense body of cinematic materials that have rarely, if ever, been addressed in English-language sources, and it fills a major gap in the scholarly literature. Her command of the material and of the broader setting of 1960s–1970s Palestinian cultural history is very impressive, and her analysis is original and illuminating. She shows definitively that the work of Palestinian filmmakers before the 1980s is of significant interest on its own and is also critical to our appreciation of more contemporary Palestinian cinema.
~Kamran Rastegar, Tufts University, author of Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East
This book offers an important contribution to the study of Palestinian cinema, which has often been restricted to addressing tropes of resistance, agency, and empowerment. Its focus on films produced in the revolutionary period of contemporary Palestinian history provides a new understanding of how and why Palestinian cinema was essential to the revolutionary impetus.
~Dina Matar, SOAS University of London, author of What It Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood
