Twelve Palestinian women sit before us and talk of their life before the Diaspora, of their memories, of their lives and of their identity. Their narratives are connected by the enduring thread of the ancient art of embroidery. Twelve resilient, determined and articulate women from disparate walks of life: lawyers, artists, housewives, activists, architects, and politicians stitch together the story of their homeland, of their dispossession, and of their unwavering determination that justice will prevail. Through their stories, the individual weaves into the collective, yet remaining distinctly personal. Twelve women, twelve life-spans, and stories from Palestine; a land whose position was fixed on the map of the world, but is now embroidered on its face.

Call her a freedom fighter or a terrorist; Leila Khaled was the first woman to ever hijack an airplane. Born and raised in Haifa, in the 1960s Khaled became one of the most celebrated and reviled public figures of the PFLP. Raised by Palestinian exiles in Sweden, the filmmaker considered Khaled her teenage idol. Yet, settled into a seemingly conventional middle age in exile in Jordan, Khaled hardly seems the picture of revolutionary zeal the filmmaker imagined. Archival footage and engaging interviews with a still fierce Khaled, as well as the pilots, flight attendants, and passengers from the planes Khaled and her comrades hijacked, bring together public context and personal history with the passage of time to tell the stories of those harrowing flights and the woman who was willing to die to free her country

1971 film directed by Masao Adachi, Kōji Wakamatsu

TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.