In a brief scene in Si Moh (1971), an early short by Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, the eponymous character sits in room with other north African immigrants in France and listens to a man read inexpertly from a newspaper in standard Arabic about the question of Palestine: “To define the enemy’s nature that the Armed Revolution faces in Palestine, we have to understand the role that played and plays Israel and the reason of its existence in the Middle East.” The haltingly read statement can be heard over a montage of footage shot in Paris: a tracking shot along a modest city street, shots of Si Moh and other men resting on bunkbeds in the modest room where the reading takes place, and men working on a construction site. The reading is interrupted by a man asking Si Moh how he immigrated to France. The brief scene evokes both the distance between the Palestinian question and this immigrant community and its immediate concerns over housing and work on the one hand and the larger colonial and postcolonial structures that link him with the Palestinian cause. In many ways Si Moh exemplifies cinematic solidarity with Palestine and the tension between engagement and distance that has characterized that engagement. As part of a larger project tracing the development of “engaged” Arab cinema in the mid-20th century, this paper examines the representation of Palestine in the films of what have been variously called alternative, new, or serious cinema from the 1970s and 80s. Cinema developed around the Arab world at this time at the confluence of overlapping movements for radical decolonization and national development. While at certain times and places those movements overlapped, they often coexisted in tension, if not outright opposition, to each other. While the question of Palestine was central to the former movement, it was famously instrumentalized by Arab leaders to strategically shore up domestic support. Palestine is refracted through the imbrication of the Palestine question with postcolonial national and transnational concerns in these filmmakers’ works. Tracing these tensions is important for a full understanding of global solidarity on the question of Palestine including the structural conditions that limit it even for its most ardent participants.