history
Palestinian stop motion
Definition
Palestinian stop motion is best understood not as a single studio style but as a distributed practice made by filmmakers and educators working across Palestine, Jordan, Europe and the wider diaspora. Its documented forms range from articulated puppet films built through international co-production to paper-based workshop films made collectively by children and displaced communities. The common thread is the physical, frame-by-frame construction of images; the production structures around that method vary sharply.
Overview
One visible strand runs through filmmaker Ahmad Saleh and the family-based production practice around ses-Studio. Saleh’s *House* (2012), *Ayny — My Second Eye* (2016) and *Night / Layl* (2021) form a useful sequence because the films show stop motion moving through different institutional contexts rather than staying inside one national studio system. Palestina Animada describes Saleh’s family as developing a craft culture around hand-making and building puppets and sets, while the Toronto Palestine Film Festival and StopTrik present him specifically as a stop-motion filmmaker. *Night* is the clearest production example in the SMDB catalogue: Fabian&Fred and Palestina Animada both identify it as puppet stop motion, made as a Germany–Qatar–Jordan–Palestine co-production with ses-Studio and Fabian&Fred. That makes the production network itself part of the history: Palestinian stop motion here is carried through family collaboration, European production infrastructure, Arab funding and festival circulation at the same time.
*Ayny* shows why this history should not be reduced to “puppet film” as a fixed visual category. Palestina Animada lists the film’s technique as puppet animation combined with live action and 3D CGI, and its credits separate puppet fabrication, props, character design and 3D animation into distinct departments. The stop-motion capture method therefore sits inside a hybrid production rather than opposing digital work. Saleh’s own comments in a 2024 Zippy Frames interview make the same point at the level of authorship: he describes medium as something that should follow the story rather than become a rule imposed in advance. In this context, stop motion is a chosen physical language — powerful, laborious and culturally portable — not a requirement that every Palestinian animated film share the same construction method.
A second strand is pedagogical and locally distributed. Animator and educator Haneen Koraz has led animation workshops in Gaza since 2012, according to Palestina Animada, and later worked with Nour A-Jawad and Shorouq Darwish on stop-motion workshops for children, women and disabled communities. Their more recent work in Deir al-Balah used simple paper-based techniques under displacement conditions and produced collective shorts such as *A Day in the Tent* and *Grandmother Wore Us Out*. Zippy Frames’ 2025 interview with Koraz and A-Jawad documents how the workshops expanded from children’s activities into a broader practice among displaced participants, while Fest Anča describes the resulting films as workshop-made stop-motion works. This is a materially different production model from *Night*: lightweight tools, group authorship, education and immediate lived experience replace a conventional studio pipeline, yet the frame-by-frame physical method remains recognisably the same craft.
Taken together, these examples argue for treating Palestinian stop motion as an ecosystem rather than a lineage with one centre. Professional puppet production, hybrid student and festival work, diaspora co-production, family workshops and community teaching all overlap. Palestina Animada is especially valuable because it makes that distributed structure visible in one archive, placing internationally circulated films beside community-made work and preserving technique labels and credits that are otherwise scattered across festival and institutional sites. The important historical distinction is therefore between **capture method and production structure**: puppet stop motion in a multi-country professional short and paper stop motion made in a temporary workshop belong to the same technical family, while their resources, authorship and institutional conditions are fundamentally different.