The UK government ban on a documentary following Palestine Action transformed the film into a living symbol of state overreach
Last month, a documentary titled To Kill A War Machine, directed by Hannan Majid and Richard York of Rainbow Collective, was released online ahead of schedule – precipitated by the UK Home Office’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. The film chronicles activities by direct‑action activists targeting Israeli arms manufacturers in the UK – a chronicle of civil resistance caught on body cams and protesters’ phones. But with the Terrorism Act now extending to the group, and potentially to anyone who views, screens or distributes the film, this documentary has inadvertently become something else: a living fault line in the debate around documentary as activism.
Documentary is often retrospective: a historical record framed through selective editing. Yet To Kill A War Machine, in the very act of being released under threat, became a form of political engagement – an after‑the‑fact activism. It’s not merely reporting on protest; the film’s circulation becomes a defiant act, contested in the same legal theatre as the actions it documents. The proscription of Palestine Action (by a vote of 385–26 in the House of Commons on 2 July, with effect from 5 July) retroactively criminalises association, tacitly including watchers and distributors of the film (for which the exact legal ramifications remain unclear). The documentary thus shifts from observer to instigator, challenging the state’s attempt to erase protest by silencing its depiction.
The film’s potency lies in its immediacy: handheld cameras capturing activists smashing factory glass, scaling fences, dousing equipment in red paint. Interspersed with interviews and calm narration by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, cofounders of the group, it humanises a covert movement, presenting trespass and property damage as moral resistance to complicity in conflict. Rather than depicting protesters as faceless disruptors, it presents them as individuals bound by care, urgency and shared risk. Majid and York – longstanding human‑rights filmmakers who have previously made documentaries about garment workers in Bangladesh (Tears in the Fabric, 2014) – compiled these images from material already circulating across activist networks and social media, positioning activists as both agents of the action and authors of its telling.
Of course, no documentary is free from mediation. To Kill A War Machine, like any film, is the result of choices – what to show, what to cut, how to frame action, how to pace revelation. It is, inevitably, a constructed narrative. But where mainstream media often uses its editorial processes to flatten conflict into digestible spectacle or to preserve the illusion of neutrality, this film makes its partiality visible. It refuses the polished distance of ‘objective’ reportage, instead offering proximity: the sweat, the risk, the shared breath of collective action. In doing so, it doesn’t claim to show the whole truth – it claims to show a truth that is too often omitted, one that implicates the viewer not as passive observer but as participant in the structures being contested (what the Israeli author and curator Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has called ‘transit visas’, binding the witness to the witnessed).
What distinguishes this moment from past documentary controversies like Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002) – banned in Israel after a defamation suit, all copies of the film ultimately confiscated – or the BBC’s withdrawal of Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone in February 2025 for its narrator’s familial ties to Hamas is the retroactive extension of the proscribed group’s legal status to include its images and storytellers. Where Israel cited defamation in Jenin and the BBC invoked impartiality rules in Gaza, here the British government uses antiterror powers to stamp down visibility. Film isn’t merely censored; it becomes evidence of criminal affiliation.
In No Other Land, the 2024 film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective documenting an insider’s perspective of the destruction of villages in the West Bank, the politics of representation sculpted its destiny. Despite winning an Oscar, its lack of distribution in the West has left it ‘in limbo’, according to The Guardian, a form of invisible censorship that silences Palestinian filmmakers through market dynamics rather than legal means. Where To Kill A War Machine encounters an overt legal ban, films like No Other Land are throttled by political economies – and platforms unwilling to engage with controversy. Activism here is deferred: awards accumulate, but spectatorship remains static. Meanwhile, its codirector is attacked by masked Israeli settlers in his home village of Susya.
So the directors of To Kill A War Machine, warned they may break terrorism laws by distributing their own work into such a hostile legal environment, recalibrate plans: festivals, public screenings and international export. Yet documentary cinema’s power lies in delayed resonance. That the BBC recently pulled another film, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (2025), which finally screened on the UK’s Channel 4 last week, reflects a media ecosystem increasingly vulnerable to political and institutional pressures. But when a state actually weaponises law to erase imagery, it admits to the film’s potency to disrupt. Merit – often judged by film festival acclaim, awards or critical coverage – matters less than the capacity to shape public imagination. Documentaries are repositories of collective memory, and banning them is an attempt to block knowledge and engineer forgetting. But in the digital age, such efforts backfire. To Kill A War Machine’s early release was greeted by a global spike in downloads the moment the proscription news broke, a spontaneous rallying to resist its total erasure. The ban transformed the film into an icon of resistance, a living symbol of state overreach.
In this context, documentary becomes not just witness, but weapon. It ambushes the ban not before the fact, but after – and, crucially, endures between the details of news cycles. The appetite for raw, activist-first imagery grows in response to institutional suppression. Cinema must respond by finding new, creative ways to circumvent this suppression: diversifying distribution channels, embracing decentralised and grassroots networks, cross-border collaborations, and digital and activist-led platforms. Ultimately, documentary’s after-the-fact efficacy reminds us that truth doesn’t need an audience: it needs a record – and sometimes, a ban is the surest way to preserve one.
Finn Blythe is a writer and filmmaker based in London
