The release of The Dupes marked a significant turning point in Palestinian cinema. What preceded it were modest, incomplete, at times consumerist experiments that could not be considered revolutionary today, nor at the time. Tewfik Saleh’s 1973 feature proved to be the first serious cinematic entry into the Palestinian canon, and the first film of the Palestinian revolution.

Written and directed by Saleh, produced by the General Film Organization in Syria, and starring both Egyptian and Syrian actors, the film was screened at the first Damascus Youth Film Festival in 1972 and was selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors’ Fortnight program. An adaptation of the 1962 novel Men in the Sun, by revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani, it follows three separate Palestinian refugees, in the wake of the Nakba, who come together to make a deal with a water-tank driver that claims he can smuggle them into Kuwait, where they hope to find work and a better life.

The Dupes is lauded today, and at the time of its release, not just as a historical landmark, but for its meticulous craftsmanship. The screenplay adapted from Kanafani’s story is incisive, particularly in its use of flashbacks to recall the backstory of each of the four men, who each have their own chapter in the novel. As each player is introduced in the primary timeline, Saleh takes us back to where they were before—through voice over narration and silent montage, we see the journey of each man, the life they once knew (this film is the first motion picture to depict Palestinian life before the Nakba), their families, their unfortunate situations, their breaking points—and in returning to the present, gives the main timeline a causal continuity.

The film also makes effective use of archival footage, depicting the then-newly established refugee camps in the early stages of Palestinian refugeehood at the height of the Nakba. This non-representational footage, from newsreels to images of Palestinian children behind barbed wire, civilians trudging through rubble to camps crowded with tents, while politicians and United Nations officers sit at tables to decide their destiny, gives the film a tangible historical context. The heroes in this story could be individuals, but because of their group identification, cannot be. It is their group identity that forces them in the direction of ill-fated trauma and death.

An Egyptian filmmaker who, up until this point, had worked solely in the cinema of his home country, Tewfik Saleh’s auteurism took great influence from Italian neorealism, in which a defining characteristic is the constant, cyclical portrayal of working class struggle aimed to mirror the conditions of real life. This influence is reflected in Saleh’s decision to change the film’s title from its source material: Men in the Sun both references the dramatic climax of the film and paints a picture of the three fugitives eternally stuck in time; The Dupes, on the other hand, underlines the fate of these men: they have been duped, deceived, cheated—embodying the symbolic reality of the Palestinian people.

Saleh’s approach would prove to be an essential point in the heritage of Palestinian cinema, with The Dupes bringing about a legacy of misery-as-perennial-protagonist. Here lies the primary deviation from the source material: Kanafani’s use of misery promises a future confrontation, rebellion, hinting at a promised revolutionary state. In the novel’s final passage, the author begs the question, “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” directly asking his characters why they did not attempt to free themselves from the water tank they were trapped in. The political realities in Palestine, however, had changed significantly from the novel’s publication in 1963 to the film’s premiere a decade later. So while Men in the Sun poses the question, the film offers a response: in a haunting final shot, we realize that our protagonists did knock on the walls of the tank—but despite their efforts, it was impossible to avoid their fate. This answer is an expression of rejection, rebellion, and armed struggle, sparking the revolutionary spirit within the Palestinian; one hand knocking on the tank, the other hand carrying a weapon.

Regardless of its landmark status, The Dupes is a high-level artistic work and a pivotal, foundational piece of Arab New Realist cinema. It remains one of the best productions from the Palestinian revolution, and as well within the collective work of Palestinian cinema: an insurgent gesture that reaches out to a new horizon.