A Seat at Whose Table?

Ask yourself a simple question, and answer it honestly: when was the last time you saw a Muslim on screen who truly looked like you? Not a threat. Not a punchline. Not a body in the rubble behind someone else’s war. I mean a whole person: a son with a mother who worries, a friend with a joke that lands, a believer whose faith steadies him, someone whose life is bigger than the headline around him.

Badie and Hamza Ali at Cannes

For most of my life, I could count those moments on one hand. That absence was never an accident. It was a choice, made again and again in rooms where people like us were rarely invited. And the cost was always heavier than wounded pride. When a screen strips someone of their humanity, it becomes easier for the world to do the same.

© Watermelon Pictures

We learned that the hard way over these last two years.

Since October 2023, the world has been forced to look at Gaza—not through the frame of people who preferred that we remain quiet, but through the eyes, phones, voices, and courage of the people living it. Something shifted. I do not think it can be shifted back. For once, the story slipped out of the hands that had held it for so long.

What I want to make is not only a case for film, or even a case for Palestine alone. The moment in front of us is larger than both. It is an invitation to an Ummah of two billion people who have spent too long waiting for a seat at someone else’s table.

We do not need the seat. We need to build the table.

Everywhere on Screen, Nowhere in the Room

Watermelon Pictures began with a frustration many Muslims will recognize. It is the frustration that sits in your chest when you love movies, love stories, love the feeling of being carried into another life, and then watch your own people reduced to scenery inside someone else’s imagination.

© Watermelon Pictures

My brother Hamza and I grew up loving stories. We also grew up watching Arabs and Muslims appear in them almost exclusively as villains, victims, or background: the hijacker at the gate, the grieving mother in a war zone, the faceless crowd chanting in a language the audience had been trained to fear. We were nowhere in the room where the screen was made. After a while, frustration becomes a decision. Ours was simple. We would stop arguing with the picture and start changing who held the camera.

We did have one advantage. Watermelon Pictures grew out of MPI Media Group, the distribution company my uncle Waleed Ali and my father Malik Ali built more than fifty years ago. They were pioneers of America’s independent home video industry, bringing classic TV series like ‘Dark Shadows’, ‘The Honeymooners’, and ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ into homes and helping make the Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ a home video hit.

© Watermelon Pictures

By the time Hamza and I came along, that company had grown into a library of more than two thousand films and programs, along with the relationships, scars, and hard-won knowledge of how a film actually reaches the world. None of what I am about to describe happens without them. The vision and foundation was theirs first—laid long before we understood what we might one day build on top of it.

What did not yet exist was a company built from that foundation to carry Palestinian and Muslim stories to audiences on our own terms. So that is the company we made.

We are Watermelon Pictures: a fearless film studio dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices through storytelling that humanizes through entertainment. That last phrase matters. It is the whole philosophy, and I will come back to it.

The name is not subtle, and that was the point. The watermelon became a symbol of Palestine after the flag itself was banned. People reached for a fruit that carried the same colors and the same defiance, because you cannot ban what grows in every garden and is split open on every kitchen table.

We did not set out to make sad films about a sad people. We set out to make great films, the kind where an Arab or Muslim character finally gets to be funny, flawed, complicated, faithful, joyful, and fully alive. Representation was never the destination. Representation is the floor. The goal is dignity. The goal is to be received as fully human, which is the one thing that has so often been withheld from us.

What Happened When the World Watched

In our first year, alhamdulillah, the work moved faster and reached further than anything we expected.

We acquired ‘From Ground Zero’, an anthology of twenty-two short films made by filmmakers inside Gaza during the bombardment, directors documenting their own survival with little more than cameras, instinct, and courage. It became Palestine’s submission for Best International Feature and reached the Academy Awards shortlist. A film made in the middle of a genocide was honored by the same industry that had spent decades looking away. Michael Moore was so moved by it that he came aboard as an executive producer.

Then came “The Encampments”, our documentary on the student movement that began at Columbia and spread from campus to campus around the world. We released it in the middle of a witch hunt. Students who had stood up for Gaza were being branded antisemites and terrorists. They were facing suspensions, arrests, and deportations, and the story the country was being fed bore almost no resemblance to the young people we had filmed.

So we fast-tracked the release. For a while, the film stood as one of the only counter-narratives to that lie. On opening weekend, it broke the per-theater box office record held by Free Solo, a National Geographic blockbuster. A documentary about solidarity with Palestine, made with the artist Macklemore, outran the studio machine on its own ground.

The recognition kept coming. Three of the films we brought to audiences reached the same shortlist: “Palestine ‘36”, Annemarie Jacir’s epic of the 1936 uprising against British rule, which we released across North America; “All That’s Left of You”, Cherien Dabis’s portrait of one family across seven decades of exile, Jordan’s submission, which we co-released; and “The Voice of Hind Rajab”, which went on to earn a full Academy Award nomination.

© Watermelon Pictures

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” is built around the real recorded voice of a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, begging someone to come and save her. We came aboard as production partners and helped carry it to American audiences through its digital release, so that a child the world was willing to forget now has her voice traveling across one of the most watched stages in entertainment. Some critics started calling it a wave—’The Watermelon Wave’, they wrote, about a company that did not exist three years ago.

A still from “The Voice of Hind Rajab” © Watermelon Pictures

I do not list these things to boast. I list them as evidence. The appetite for our stories was there the whole time. The audience was there. The hunger was there. The only thing missing was us.

What did not yet exist was a company built from that foundation to carry Palestinian and Muslim stories to audiences on our own terms. So that is the company we made. We are Watermelon Pictures: a fearless film studio dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices through storytelling that humanizes through entertainment

And the work is not finished. ‘“American Doctor” premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance, the debut feature from director Poh Si Teng, and we are carrying it to audiences as a serious Academy Award contender. It follows three American doctors who volunteered in Gaza: one Palestinian Muslim, one Jewish, one Zoroastrian. They agree on almost nothing except the only thing that matters in that moment, which is that a child’s life is worth crossing the world to save. That film holds the whole argument of this essay inside a single frame.

The Room We Left Empty

Some of this we did to ourselves. For a long time, our community treated the arts as beneath us, beside the point, or even inappropriate for a serious person of faith. We steered our brightest children toward medicine, law, engineering, and business. Those are honorable callings, and may God bless the people who answer them. But somewhere along the way, we taught a generation that storytelling was not serious work for serious people. Without quite meaning to, we left the room empty.

A room left empty never stays empty for long.

The people who walked into that room were not neutral, and they made choices about us. Sometimes they left us out of the story entirely. When they did put us on screen, they often misrepresented us with intent, because a frightening Muslim and a foreign Muslim were useful characters. The beauty of this deen unsettled them: a faith that asks for discipline in an age of indulgence, modesty in an age of exposure, submission to God in an age that worships the self. They could not win an argument against the substance of Islam, so they went to work on the image of the Muslim instead.

Frame by frame, they made us frightening. Frame by frame, they made us foreign. Frame by frame, they made us less than human.

Once a people has been made less than human in the imagination, the rest becomes easier. The bomb is easier to drop. The siege is easier to defend. The body count is easier to scroll past. What happens on the screen does not stay on the screen. It writes a permission slip for what the world allows to happen on the ground.

I am not saying our absence caused the cruelty. I am saying our absence left us defenseless against the lie. We handed over the most powerful instrument the modern world has produced, the moving image, and then we were stunned to find it aimed back at us. But a tool you surrender is a tool you can take back. That is what is finally happening now.

And in one sense, we do not have to work nearly as hard as the people who have spent years vilifying us. A lie is exhausting to keep alive. The truth is not. They have to invent the villain, dress him, light him, repeat him, and keep the story straight across a thousand films. We only have to turn the camera on and show what is already there. The truth is cheaper to tell, and far harder to kill. That advantage has been ours from the beginning.

Humanize Through Entertainment

Three words sit beneath everything we make: humanize through entertainment. Read them again, because the weight rests on the last word. Entertainment.

Our job is not to make the world weep. The world has wept enough. It is not to march our wounds across a screen in search of pity, because pity is the cheapest thing one person can hand another and it is forgotten by lunch. Our job is to make the world fall in love with us: with our humor, our families, the chaos of our dinner tables, our weddings and grandmothers and prayers, and above all the way we love one another. The world does not need another film about how Muslims die. It is starving for a film about how Muslims live.

@Watermelon Pictures

It needs our comedy, because a people who can make you laugh can never again be flattened into a headline. It needs our drama, because our heartbreak deserves an audience as much as anyone else’s. And more than either, it needs our values.

Look at what the culture celebrates now: cruelty rebranded as strength, selfishness sold back to us as freedom, money worshiped in the place of God. Now look at what we have carried all along: mercy, restraint, loyalty to family and neighbor, reverence for the elderly, tenderness toward children, and the old, radical idea that you owe something to the person beside you and to the One above you.

That is not nostalgia. It is not backwardness. It is a whole civilization of meaning, sitting in storage while the world outside goes hungry for the very thing we taught ourselves to hide.

We are not behind the culture. We are holding what the culture is desperate to find. What remains is to be brave enough to put it on the screen and let people see it for what it is.

Palestine Became the Test

Here is something I have come to believe over these last two years: Palestine has become the litmus test of our age. If you cannot bring yourself to stand against a genocide this clear, you will likely be wrong on almost everything else that matters. Ignorance and silence are no longer acceptable, because the longer you look at Palestine, the more you see the same injustice wearing a hundred different faces.

© Watermelon Pictures

Palestine is the wound, the one cause that takes hold of a Muslim heart and refuses to let go. But it has also become larger than a cause. Where a person stands on Palestine now tells you whether their principles are real or merely decorative. Students risked their degrees over it. Artists lost contracts over it. Ordinary people looked hard at their leaders, and at the feeds they had trusted, and understood at last who had been lying to them.

The world is waking up, slowly and at a terrible cost. People who never spared us a thought are thinking about us now. Many of them, when they finally look, are surprised by how much of themselves they recognize.

This is the part that gives me hope. Our Ummah disagrees about nearly everything. We divide over schools of thought, leaders, strategy, even the sighting of the moon. Yet on Palestine there is no division. From Jakarta to Casablanca to the south side of Chicago, two billion of us stand as a single body. We mourn our disunity so loudly that we miss the proof in front of us: we can unite, and we just did. The only question left is whether we will use that capacity for anything beyond grief.

Build the Table

This is the argument I came to make: we have to stop asking and start building.

For too long, our instinct has been to petition: to write the letter, sign the statement, request the meeting, and hope for a fair hearing from institutions that were never built with us in mind and have now shown us, in daylight, exactly what they think of us. We have been gathering crumbs from a table that was never going to feed us, then returning again and again, surprised that the menu has not changed.

Enough of that.

Look at the people of Gaza beyond the headlines: people who have lost homes, families, and nearly everything a person can lose, and who still pray on time, still teach their children, still film and write and plant in the rubble, still refuse to vanish. If a people stripped of almost everything can hold their dignity like that, what excuse do the rest of us have, sitting on everything we have been given?

Conversation between Palestinian-American actress and director, Cherien Dabis, with Spanish actor and executive producer, Javier Bardem, during the presentation of the film “All That’s Left of You” at the Academia de Cine in Madrid, Spain (November 2025).
© IMAGO / Europa Press / Diego Radamés

We have no excuse, because we already have what we need. We are two billion people, and we are not poor in talent. Look at the United States alone and count the Muslim doctors and surgeons, lawyers and engineers, professors, founders, financiers, writers, artists, and organizers. We have built other people’s institutions all the way to the top floor. We have not yet gathered that brilliance into something of our own.

The world does not need another film about how Muslims die. It is starving for a film about how Muslims live

Picture it, and let yourself want it: our own studios, universities, banks, hospitals, firms, and newsrooms, founded on values instead of greed and open to anyone who shares them, whether of our faith, another faith, or none at all. That is who we are at our best: the household where the guest and the stranger are fed before the family sits.

There is one more thing we built, and it may matter more than any single film. We built our own platform, Watermelon+­—streaming platform where people power stories that inspire a better world.  It includes the most definitive collection of Palestinian cinema ever gathered in one place. For a hundred years, the people who controlled distribution held the real power, the power to decide what you were permitted to see and what would quietly vanish. So we took that power into our own hands. When the choice of whether our films reach you belongs to us, and not to a gatekeeper who fears the subject, that is what independence looks like.

Watermelon Pictures is one small table, in one corner of one industry, and by itself it answers almost nothing. But it is proof that the thing can be done. We did not wait for permission. We did not earn the blessing of the gatekeepers. We built it, and the world came anyway.

Hind’s Voice

I think about Hind Rajab often. A six-year-old girl, alone in a car, surrounded by the people she loved who were already gone, asking strangers on a phone to please come and save her. The world heard that voice too late to save her. Yet the world is hearing it now, from one of the most prominent stages entertainment has, because someone refused to let it be silenced.

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” received a 23-minute ovation at Venice film festival in 2025. © IMAGO / Christian Ender

Underneath the premieres, shortlists, and headlines, that is what this work is: a refusal—refusal to let our people be erased, distorted, and turned into someone else’s nightmare for someone else’s profit.

We are inviting the world to know us, to laugh with us and grieve with us, to pull up a chair and taste what we have been carrying all along.

So build the table. Set the places. By the will of God, they will come. And when they do, I pray they find us exactly as we have always been: whole, dignified and, at long last, fully seen.