Hana Elias
Films
Projects
all projects
If These Stones Could Talk
Documentary, feature in development
Hana Elias, Director and Editor
Anakha Arikara and Asmahan Bkerat, Producers
Awards and Labs
Palestine Film Institute IDA, 2026
Palestine Showcase IDFA, 2025
BRIC Film and TV Residency 2025
Thessaloniki Development award, 2024
Firelight Documentary Lab fellow 2024
Hana Elias returns with her father, Nassib, and mother, Maha, to their hometown of Shefa-Amr, where she weaves together a family visual archive while recovering Palestinian land practices erased by occupation. As she uncovers a past that echoes her parents’ present-day choices, Hana begins to discover her family, her identity, and her connection to the land through the eyes of those who came before her.
Publicity
‘My Stolen Planet’ Wins Top Prize At Thessaloniki Int’l Documentary Festival; Controversial ‘Stray Bodies’ Earns Festival Recognition, Deadline, March 17, 2024
Firelight Media Sets Documentary Lab Fellows For 2024-26, Deadline, November 14, 2024
Where The Wind Blows مهب الريح
Documentary short, 2025
Hana Elias, Director and Editor
Anakha Arikara and Asmahan Bkerat, Producers
Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi, Editor and Writer
Omar Jabareen, Additional cinematography
Awards
If/Then Shorts X Redford Center Nature Connection pitch 2024
Best Short Documentary, Arab Film and Media Institute
IG @wherethewindblows_film
Trailer
After building a life in New York City, Nassib returns to his Palestinian hometown of Shefa-’Amr after 50 years to revive an ancestral garden. Filmmaker Hana captures her whole family’s search for belonging as she intimately films the rituals and practices around their first olive harvest.
Screenings 2025: Doc NYC, Big Sky Film Festival, London Palestine Film Festival, Karama Human Rights Film Festival, Braziers International Film Festival, Corto Fieno, Hot Springs Short Documentary Festival
Dedication إهداء (working title)
Documentary, Short in production
Director, editor
Adam Rouhana, collaborating artist and producer
Mashal Kawasmi, cinematographer
Supported by
UFO Short Film Lab
Press
Filmmaker Mag
Through the lens of a vintage large-format camera, photographer Adam Rouhana sets up a mobile studio across Palestinian cities. The studio travels through Jenin and Jerusalem, centering personal stories about the images that matter most in people’s lives, and exploring how photographs preserve memory, dignity, and the ways people wish to be remembered.
Adrift على غير هدى
Experimental documentary, short 2026
Cinematographer, editor, writer
Made during Spring Sessions Residency at the Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem, Palestine 2025
Exhibition - All The Wild Places, December 2025
Trailer
Adrift is a film poem about the never ending journey to return to a place that exists within our memory. In this visual poem, archival footage from Hana Elias’s grandfather taken on a trip to Palestine in 1986 documents a once vast landscape of the Cremisan valley. Capturing beauty and nostalgia, the familial footage intersperses with the filmmakers present day experience of coming back to the region, which in contrast is often contained chaotic and movement has become much more restricted. Sonically and rhythmically the film is guided by the “sounds of place soundtrack” recorded in the Cremisan valley in 2024.
Al Manajel المناجل
Agricultural community group
Organized a Wheat Harvest in Shefa-Amr, learning to use traditional techniques with the sickle to produce half a ton of wheat to regenerate indigenous Palestinian heirloom seeds
IG: @almanajel_
Holding Fire
Documentary Short, 2019
Co-director, editor and cinematographer with Eleonore Voisard
Trailer
Supported by
The Pulitzer Center for International Reporting
Columbia Journalism School Doc ‘18
Somia Elrowmeim is a Yemeni immigrant—and American citizen—fighting for the rights of Muslims in South Brooklyn at a time of unprecedented Islamophobia. The documentary "Holding Fire" follows her trajectory as a rising activist..