Simone Bitton was born in Morocco in 1955 and divides her time between Paris, Rabat and Jerusalem. She graduated from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1981. His oeuvre consists of more than two dozen films and documentary series for cinema and television. His work is formally diverse - investigative documentaries, archival editing, poetic essay films, first-hand reports and intimate portraits of avant-garde writers, artists and political figures - without shying away from his political commitment to the history, culture and contemporary context of the Middle East and North Africa, a deep personal and professional commitment that his films attest to. The series he directed, Les grandes voix de la Chanson Arabe (1990), and the film Palestine, the history of a land (1993), are reference works that are still being distributed and broadcast in several countries 20 years after their release. The Wall (2004) and Rachel (2009) have won several awards, including the Sundance Special Jury Prize and the César Award. Bitton teaches at the Université Paris-VIII-Vincennes-Saint-Denis and is a member of the Ateliers Varan.
Elias Sanbar was born in 1947, in Haifa. Activist, writer, historian and diplomat, he studied in France, where he founded the journal Revue d’étude palestiniennes in 1981 and served as its chief-editor until 2006. He taught international law at Paris VII University and, later, he taught in Lebanon and at Princeton University. He is the Ambassador of Palestine for UNESCO since 2006 and is a member of the Palestinian National Council. In the 90s, he was instrumental as a peace negotiator. He is the main translator for famous poet Mahmoud Darwish and has published several books, such as Les Palestiniens dans le siècle (1994), Le bien des absents (2001) and photography books like Les Palestiniens: La photographie d'une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours (2004). An eminent figure in the defence of Palestine, all of Sanbar’s work tries to reveal to the world its identity and cultural wealth. In 2005, he received the Grand Prix de la Francophonie de l'Académie française and, in 2011, he was awarded the rank of Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters.
