Palestinian-Jordanian Filmmaker Darin J. Sallam on the Backlash to ‘Farha’: ‘I Never Regretted It’

Palestinian-Jordanian filmmaker Darin J. Sallam has no regrets about making “Farha,” her debut feature about a Palestinian girl coming of age during the Nakba, the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The film sparked controversy that Sallam was warned could derail her career before it had properly begun.

“I never questioned that decision or regretted it for a moment,” Sallam tells Variety from UAE, where she is serving as a member of the narrative features jury at the 13th Sharjah Intl. Festival for Children and Youth. “Everything that went into bringing the film to life was worth it, and its impact continues to resonate to this day.”

“Farha” was inspired by the story of a Palestinian refugee, passed down to Sallam through her mother. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2021, was later selected as Jordan’s submission for the international feature Oscar and subsequently streamed globally on Netflix.

Its Netflix release prompted a fierce backlash, particularly over a scene depicting Israeli soldiers killing a Palestinian family. Israeli officials publicly condemned the film, while Sallam and others involved with it faced harassment and online abuse. Sallam has also been unable to travel to Palestine since the film’s release.

The warnings rolled in even before the film was shot. “I always knew in my heart that choosing ‘Farha’ as my debut feature film would be an experience unlike anything I had encountered before or will encounter in the future,” she says.

For Sallam, the film grew out of a broader conviction that history is most powerful when experienced through individual lives. “Personal stories are often the most powerful way to understand history and society,” she explains. “Behind every historical event, there are individual lives, emotions, struggles and dreams that deserve to be heard.”

She is particularly drawn to women’s stories because, she says, so many of their experiences have been “overlooked, silenced or left out of the historical narrative.”

In “Farha,” that meant filtering the collective experience of the Nakba through the perspective of one young girl. Sallam sees personal and collective memory as inseparable, with Farha’s journey distilling an event that transformed thousands of lives into an experience audiences could encounter through a single character.

“If cinema is not personal, it risks becoming nothing more than slogans and history lessons,” Sallam argues. “Cinema needs to emerge from a genuine human experience, from something deeply felt and lived. Only then can it move beyond delivering messages and become something that truly touches people, challenges them and stays with them.”

Sallam is again turning toward women and history with “Churching of Women,” her second feature. Set in the Levant, encompassing present-day Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, in 1938, the film follows Fadia, a pioneering female author grieving the loss of her parents who turns to her cousin for support, only to be confined against her will in a mental asylum while he seizes her inheritance. The project took part in the Busan Intl. Film Festival’s Asian Project Market in 2025 where it won the ArteKino International Award. It is now in advanced development and financing.

It began with an idea about injustice that stayed with Sallam. While she remains committed to telling stories about women whose voices have been suppressed, Sallam says the new film will allow her to explore injustice, grief, women supporting one another and colonial power structures in the region.

“I’ve always been drawn to certain story setups, and with ‘Churching,’ I’m exploring these on a broader, more complex scale, bringing multiple characters into the mix,” she explains. “It’s a challenge I’m particularly excited about, especially given my love of working with actors.”

The experience of making and releasing “Farha” is inevitably informing the process. Together with her producers, Sallam is considering what they learned from the film’s production, release and distribution, and how that knowledge can serve the journey of “Churching of Women.”

What it has not done is make her more cautious about the stories she chooses to tell. “If anything, my experience with ‘Farha’ has only strengthened my resolve to bring stories to the world through cinema,” she adds. “I cannot wait to share ‘Churching of Women’ with audiences, along with its unique characters, the world they inhabit and the journey that unfolds around them.”

That conviction also shapes the way Sallam thinks about younger audiences. Serving on the feature jury at SIFF reinforced her belief that children and adolescents are capable of engaging deeply with cinema.

“I am always moved by the curiosity and emotional maturity of young audiences,” she says. “They are not spectators to be underestimated because of their age.” Watching children and adolescents engage with films in Sharjah, she adds, has been “absolutely heartwarming.”