Disunited Nations

In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, formally described the crimes committed in Gaza as genocide. The designation placed her at the centre of a fierce political and media storm, drawing accusations from Israel and sanctions from the Trump administration. Giant billboards in Times Square attacked her by name. She continued regardless.

Director Christophe Cotteret follows Albanese across two years and multiple countries, from New York and Geneva to London and Paris, gaining access to the corridors and contradictions of an institution in deep crisis. Eighty years after its founding, the UN finds itself unable to halt the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, its declarations largely ignored, its General Assembly and Security Council pulling in opposite directions.

The film raises a question that runs through every sequence: what remains of international law when Western states look away, and the body created to uphold the promise of "never again" is reduced to issuing statements no one is bound to honour?

Alongside the Gaza conflict, the documentary turns its attention to the accelerating colonisation of the West Bank and the largely unreported violence there, widening the frame beyond the immediate crisis into something with much longer roots.