This 2014 award-winning film offers a fictionalized narrative based on an actual set of events, when the community of the small West Bank town of Beit Sahour finds their legally purchased cows to be designated a “threat to national security” of the Israeli state. Through an elegant integration of claymation, animation, and interviews, Palestinian multimedia artist Amer Shomali, in collaboration with Canadian documentary filmmaker Paul Cowan, creates, in tone as well as format, a comic articulation of local resistance. When told from the perspective of these very personalized and animated cows, we witness the absurdity of the Israeli army’s quest to confiscate these creatures against the efforts of the Palestinian collective. In a context of devastating violence and human rights abuses, this story recognizes the potential of local activism.

“When I was in the refugee camp, I built this utopian image about what Palestine looked like and how the Palestinians are—an image created from posters I used to see, comics I used to read. I structured the film starting from that experience—what I was expecting of Palestine, recreating the imagination of my childhood in amination. So we started to do the film from that point of view: the way I used to see Palestinians as superheroes and cows as talking animals.” – Amer Shomali