The Gaza Strip, in Filmstrips

“Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989,” the archival documentary by Göran Hugo Olsson, is as expansive as its title suggests. For nearly 3½ hours, it chronicles the Israeli occupation of Palestine as told on Sveriges Television, Sweden’s public broadcaster, founded in 1956. The film captures the tumultuous history of the Palestinian territories as refracted through an ostensibly neutral nation — albeit one whose media approach transforms over the years, from ogling fascination with the emergence of a fellow socialist state, to the rigorous exposé of war crimes by journalists on the scene.   

Olsson presents each newsreel and program chronologically, with the brief exception of his opening and closing images. These bookends are pulled from a 1985 Swedish film about the Jabalia refugee camp titled “Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Family, 1948-1984,” believed to be the first ever documentary feature shot in Gaza. It’s a work whose title and scope are reflected in Olsson’s at-length inquiry, which features voiceover from Swedish actress Pernilla August and on-screen text denoting the technical specifics of each subsequent news clip — from title to capture format. The resulting assemblage of found footage covers decades of history, from initial Arab displacements, to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, to the second intifada. If information is power, the way information is assembled is the power of documentary cinema, and Olsson and editor Britta Norell deftly balance the logistics of collating footage with the crafting of dramatic narrative.

The film exists in the tradition of lengthy left-wing political documentary essays — Chris Marker’s “Grin Without a Cat” and Johan Grimonprez’s more recent “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État” come to mind — but its closest cousin might be Andy Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls.” That double-screen avant-garde documentary — a favorite of Olsson’s — allows the viewer’s gaze to drift between contrasting images projected side by side. Although presented on a single screen, “Israel Palestine on Swedish TV” feels spiritually at one with Warhol’s prismatic approach, with two layers of reality in close proximity: the footage as it originally existed, and Olsson’s reframing. By granting roughly equal time to numerous factions, Olsson creates a multiperspective portrait of the conflict and the ways it is presented and canonized in households like his own. The result is an act of reconstruction — building a story from news clips that haven’t seen the light of day since their original broadcast — as well as an exercise in recontextualization, each vintage reel unspooled as part of a larger saga.

There are interviews with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as well as Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli soldiers and diplomats both antagonistic and sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause and children on the streets of Gaza. Despite this screen time balance — and despite Palestinians being routinely branded “terrorists” by Israeli politicians and news anchors in the footage — the film presents what feels like a rousing saga of Palestinian rebellion. In constructing their version of the story, the filmmakers do not editorialize directly. August, the film’s narrator, comments on the fullness of the Swedish archive, but never on the images themselves. Among the most impactful sequences are disarming interviews with PLO fighters and soldiers from the Israeli army, grisly footage from the Six-Day War (1967), the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982) and the first intifada (1987).

Noticeably absent is footage of Oct. 7, 2023, and its aftermath. The action in the film, conceived and edited in 2019-2024, concludes in 1989, with the Soviet Union’s collapse leading to waning support for the PLO and the signing of the Oslo Accords by Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Sweden. Ending the story with Oslo means excluding decades of recent, bloody history, but these images of that era’s guarded optimism come tinged with bitter irony, given our knowledge of what is to come. The four decades that it does cover provide essential context for the ones that follow. There is no understanding 2025 without understanding what happened in 1965 and 1985.

This is the second of Olsson’s films that takes a jukebox approach to filmmaking, and to political rebellion elsewhere in the world. His 2011 documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975” chronicled African American liberation movements through the same public broadcast lens, owing to the popularity of figures like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry Belafonte among the Swedish public. But if “Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989” is its spiritual sequel, it is the more ambitious of the two, given its historical scope and political and moral urgency. In tracing the roots of one of the preeminent humanitarian issues of our time — through the same intimate lens the filmmaker first encountered it — Olsson has produced one of the most complete cinematic documents about a political conflict in recent memory.