Middle Eastern and North African cinema
In 2004 the Palestinian Film Foundation (PFF) is created in the United Kingdom to organize Palestinian cinema in the UK. The Palestinian film Paradise Now directed by Hany Abu-Assad is released in 2005. This was the first Palestinian film allowed to enter in the United States Academy Awards. The non-governmental organization Shashat is founded in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. Its primary objective is to encourage women's filmmaking. Many young Palestinian women have joined the documentary filmmaking scene in the 2000s. Three important Palestinian documentary filmmakers are Rima Essa, Suha Arraf and May Oday. All of them work and live in Palestine. The dominant themes in modern Palestinian films are "Palestinian displacement, exile, diaspora and statelessness".