How Badie Ali and Watermelon Pictures are Decolonizing the Film Industry [INTERVIEW]

In 2004, amplifying Palestinian voices in America meant physically carrying the evidence through the streets. As a DePaul University student and co-founder of its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter during the Second Intifada, Badie Ali would walk around campus holding printed posters—an IDF soldier aiming a gun at a hijabi’s face, Jamal al-Durrah shielding his son. Before social media, there was no other infrastructure to direct people’s attention to atrocities.

Today, the technology has evolved, but the gatekeepers are still there. Ali and his brother Hamza now run Watermelon Pictures, the only Arab-led distribution label in North America willing to release the Palestinian films that legacy media and major streamers routinely red-flag as liabilities. The company operates as a subsidiary of MPI Media Group, the distribution powerhouse their father Malik and uncle Waleed built from the ground up in 1976 after the 1967 Naksa forced them back to America.

I spoke to Ali about Hollywood’s institutional blackouts, the complexity of being complicit in American comfort while distributing art about an ongoing genocide, and why he believes it’s time to shake up the distribution system.

Ali El-Sadany: I want to start at the beginning, because I think the origin story matters here. You were at DePaul during the Second Intifada, co-founding Students for Justice in Palestine. What did it actually look like to try to get anyone to pay attention back then?

Badie Ali: We had less than a dozen images. An IDF soldier putting a gun to a hijabi’s face, Faris Odeh throwing a rock at a tank, Jamal al-Durrah shielding his son. We printed them on posters and walked around campus holding them at protests. That was it. That was the whole infrastructure. You had to physically carry the images through the streets because there was no other way to make people look. This is 2004, before social media became a tool for activism. There was nothing else.

AE: Now you’re running a distribution company. That’s a pretty different kind of infrastructure. What do you think about the continuity between those two things?

BA: We’ve come a long way with social media to open up that space. But what we realized is how much it’s still controlled by gatekeepers. Legacy media, news outlets, Hollywood itself. Hollywood’s complicity is strategic. There’s been a hundred years of lack of representation, and when there is representation, it’s dehumanizing. Ninety-three percent of the time, we’re shown in a certain light, on purpose. So really where we come in uniquely is that we’re the only Arab-led distribution company in North America with deals across Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Tubi, Roku. That’s because of MPI’s longevity. My father and uncle started that company in 1976, bicycling films to nursing homes and schools, riding the VHS boom, then DVD, then television, then theatrical. Hamza and I grew up inside the business. When we realized we were the only ones positioned to do this, we knew we had a responsibility.

AE: Can you talk more about MPI? Because I think family history is really important context for understanding why Watermelon exists at all.

BA: My father Malik and my uncle Waleed started MPI after the 1967 Naksa forced them back to America. They literally started by bicycling films to nursing homes and schools. Then they caught the VHS boom early, probably among the first to put home video content on VHS, going back to the Honeymooners and Beverly Hillbillies. Then DVD. Then television and foreign licensing and theatrical. Now we’re a global distribution company with a strong emphasis in North America, which is the biggest market in the world. So when Watermelon launched, we weren’t starting from scratch. We had almost fifty years of infrastructure, relationships, deals. The question was just whether we were willing to use it.

AE: So how did Watermelon actually happen? What was the conversation that started it?

BA: Before the genocide started, Hamza and I were in our office just talking. There’s no representation for our people, whether Muslim, Arab, Palestinian. We’re never on the big screen and the content never speaks to us. We thought there’s a gap. Not just politically but commercially. There’s an audience looking for content with actual values, content that feels like something, and nobody’s serving them. So we started thinking about launching something. Then October 7th happened and we started getting approached by project after project. Ten, fifteen, twenty films, none of them with North American distribution, in every single case. We realized we had the capacity to release these to the mainstream. Because there were so many, it warranted its own label. We worked really strategically on the brand promise, the mission, the vision, the name. Then we launched it.

AE: The name itself carries a lot of history. Can you talk about where Watermelon comes from?

BA: The watermelon shares the colors of the Palestinian flag. It became a symbol of resistance in 1979, when artists in Ramallah were told by occupation forces that even paintings of watermelons would be confiscated. Just painting a piece of fruit was an act of defiance. That history felt right for what we were trying to do. Our first launch video got 8 million views. Someone called us the Palestinian Avengers. I laugh when I say that because that is a lot of pressure.

AE: I think about this a lot personally, and I want to ask you directly. You’re distributing films that document ongoing violence and erasure, and you’re doing it from America, comfortably, far from where any of it is happening. Does the distance feel like clarity to you, or does it ever feel like you’re making work about suffering you’re not actually living through?

BA: When I did Hajj in 2005, people found out I was Palestinian and almost came to kiss my hand. I stopped them. I said: I’m living in America. I’m complicit in what’s happening to my people. Do not treat me the same way you treat a Palestinian who is suffering. I am the opposite of suffering. I’m probably one of the most privileged people on earth. I’ve thought about that moment every day since. Nothing happens by chance. I truly believe we’re put in certain situations for certain reasons. When Hamza and I realized we were the only Arab-led distribution company in North America, we knew we had a responsibility to do something. You don’t do the work expecting the results to come from you. The results aren’t from us. We have to do the work. The results are truly ultimately from a bigger being at play. But you have to do your work.

AE: That sense of obligation, of using what you have, seems to run through everything you’ve built. Is that how the whole team thinks about it?

BA: Completely. Nobody on our team is doing this for a paycheck. Nobody. I regularly get approached by people willing to leave major companies for a fraction of what they’re making now, because they believe in the mission. That’s very unique. I’ve never seen something like this in this space before. It keeps Hamza and me going. In the last two and a half years we’ve never worked harder in our lives. Five times what we were doing before. The responsibility keeps building. If we could just work a little bit harder, we might be able to open this door. If we push a little more, we can do this. There’s a path to true impact and we feel it.

AE: What does the resistance actually look like in practice? Because I think people can imagine it in the abstract but the specifics are pretty striking.

BA: When From Ground Zero played theaters, a group wrote a letter to every single venue screening it saying they were only showing one side. Some theaters called to say they were getting pressure to pull it. To me, that was flattering. If you’re not making a splash and getting some resistance, you’re not doing anything. When we released The Encampments, Meta and Google refused to run our ads, calling the content discriminatory. LinkedIn deactivated our company page after we posted the trailer. So we did what we’ve always done. Grassroots networks, community screenings, word of mouth. We still did tremendous numbers. It gave us more motivation.

AE: You mentioned gatekeepers earlier. I’m curious what that looks like from inside the industry, because you have relationships with these streamers and chains in a way most people don’t.

BA: Some buyers at major streamers have told us directly: anything related to the Palestine-Israel conflict, we don’t have autonomy to make those decisions. It goes to a sensitive buyers group. We know what that means. It’s been said to us from multiple streamers. Some of the bigger theatrical chains say something similar, just in different language. Too controversial, stay away. Somebody in their hierarchy has a problem and they’re gatekeeping. So we go around them when we have to. If Netflix takes one of our films, great, their audience is bigger. But we can’t build a company on the hope that a larger entity says yes. That’s just begging for scraps all over again.

AE: There’s something you said that I keep thinking about, which is that distribution is never actually neutral. That getting a film into a theater is itself a political act. When did you come to that realization?

BA: The idea for any of this is getting it in front of eyeballs. That sounds simple but it isn’t. Hulu took The Voice of Indraja. It’s there. How much are they promoting it? I don’t know. I’m not seeing it featured. But I know there’s a Hulu audience who will stumble onto it, someone who was never part of the movement, who just sees it and thinks, what’s this, this looks interesting. Those are the people. The films do the job if you can get them in front of people. The filmmakers do a wonderful job of humanizing us, bringing light to a story. The distribution is just the function of getting it there. But when you see the obstacles, you understand that the function itself is contested.

AE: That’s the logic behind Watermelon Plus too, right? Starting to build something you actually own.

BA: If we don’t start controlling our own outlets, we’re always going to be held hostage to somebody else deciding what can be seen and what can’t. Even if Watermelon Plus is still in soft launch, the purpose is clear. The Muslim population in the world is 2 billion people. There is no bigger market than the Muslim market if you look at it as a whole. Why don’t we have our own anything? It’s almost a colonized mindset. We need to decolonize it and learn that we’re not alone, that we have everything we need, and that we can do this together.

AE: The longer vision goes pretty far beyond Palestinian documentaries though. Where do you actually want to take this?

BA: It started with urgent Palestinian films. We’ve broadened to Sudan Remembers Us, to Pakistan’s Oscar submission The Glassworker. But the real ambition is commercial. It could be a superhero film where Ali is the main character, or Ahmed happens to be. A film that works for everybody. We call it humanization through entertainment. I truly believe this is where we’re going to have the biggest impact. Even the best documentary about Palestine has a ceiling. When this country wants to bomb a people and they just look at numbers, 60,000 people, who cares, they don’t know what those 60,000 people look like, who they are, that these are humans. That’s what we’re working toward.

AE: Something you said that really stuck with me is that you don’t want people to think Watermelon is the independent company changing the world. That it’s the movement that’s changing the world and you just happen to be part of it. Can you say more about that?

BA: The most reassuring thing about Watermelon has been the connections. Bringing people together. We’re learning that we have all the talent, all the resources, even the wealth globally that we need to be successful. The problem is we’re just not unified and not working together. What I love about what we’re doing is we’ve been trying specifically to work with allied people, and then the allied people we’re working with bring their allies. We’re building an ecosystem of people who are like-minded, who are trying to envision a better world. It’s very simple. It happens to be in the media space and entertainment, where historically we just haven’t had a big footprint as a community. But it’s changing. Even inside Hollywood, we’re finding executives, people at publications, who have been waiting for someone to build what we’re building. The fact that we’re connecting all these people together, I feel very optimistic that change is there.

AE: I want to ask about the business reality of all this, because the mission is one thing but the lights have to stay on. How are you thinking about that tension?

BA: The foundation of MPI, our classics label, Dark Sky Films, that’s what allowed us to start Watermelon and keep it going. We didn’t start at zero. But long term, Watermelon needs to support itself. Hamza and I have also put in substantial amounts of our own money. What keeps us going isn’t the return. It’s the impact. But we do need to make sure the lights stay on or this doesn’t keep going. When we talk about more commercial titles, we’re hoping some of those can carry us for years. There are some really great concepts we’re working on. We’re learning ways to be sustainable that are just different models than what we’re used to with our other labels. That’s a big part of what Hamza and I focus on every day.

AE: When it gets hard, when you’re running into wall after wall, what actually keeps you going?

BA: When you’re in contact with people all over the world, but specifically in Palestine, when you see what they’re going through and their resilience, how can we not keep going? What kind of suffering is it for us, really? These people are risking their lives, going up against the most powerful army and the most powerful weapons in the world, and they’re resisting. They keep resisting. It’s contagious. I don’t want to compare what we’re doing to that. But that’s the wake-up call. They’re dying and putting their children on the line and their whole livelihood on the line. The least we could do is this.

AE: What has the personal cost of all this actually been for you?

BA: Honestly, I’m flabbergasted at the love and support. When we went into this, we thought we were going to be running into people who wanted to shut us down. The opposite happened. I can’t tell you how many people we’ve met, how many allies we’ve found, even inside institutions we thought were completely closed to us. The only thing that actually keeps me up is the fear that I’m not doing enough. Some weekends when I turn it off for a day, I think about the calls I could have made, the doors I could have tried to open. What am I doing? We’ve probably lost two or three friendships over the past two years. But you can’t compare that to the tens of thousands of people we’ve connected with. We’ve been begging for so long for scraps at the table. It’s time we build our own table.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. For the full profile on Badie Ali and Watermelon Pictures, head to FilmSlop.