‘Edward Said: Between Worlds’ Filmmakers on Author’s Legacy and the Choice to Make Their Doc Independently

“I was thinking to myself how much I missed Edward Said’s voice and his wisdom and his humanity,” says Maiken Baird, the prolific documentary producer and director behind projects like Icarus, Orwell: 2+2=5 and Venus and Serena, recalling her state of mind in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza. “I just thought: I could just bring him back in a film.”

That desire turned into Edward Said: Between Worlds, the TIFF-bound documentary feature that uses extensive archival work to tell the story of Said but also the West’s understanding of Palestine and its people.

Between Worlds takes audiences through Said’s childhood in Jerusalem and his family’s eventual relocation to Egypt during the 1948 Palestine war, and finally to the United States, where he became a noted academic in comparative literature at Columbia University and released seminal books like Orientalism. The film also tracks his work on the Palestinian National Council (and eventual resignation after the Oslo Accords) and his extensive efforts in the media to explain Palestinian history and advocate for a Palestinian state.

Between Worlds is seeking distribution out of the festival — Cinetic is handling domestic sales, with Dogwoof selling international — and is heading to Toronto as one of several non-fiction projects about Palestine, including Naza and American Doctor. “I think there is a tendency, unfortunately, in this business to loop or to lump all Palestinian films together and put them in competition with each other,” says producer Sarah Mowaswes. “This film is very much made in conversation with other Palestinian films.”

Ahead of TIFF, Baird, who takes on directing duties for Between Worlds, and Mowaswes spoke with THR about a year of sifting through Said’s archives, making the film independently and the challenges films about Palestine currently face in getting domestic distribution.

Before starting work on this documentary, what were each of your personal relationships toward and understandings of Edward Said?

MAIKEN BAIRD My parents had become friendly with Edward Said in the early ’80s. We moved to New York from Paris, and [Said’s book] The Question of Palestine had just come out in New York in 1981. My father and I read the book, and it just completely changed our worldview as Europeans. We’d learned about World War II very much through a European lens, and hadn’t learned anything about how Israel was created from the point of view of what happened to the native inhabitants and the Indigenous people, who were the Palestinians. My father reached out to Edward Said and asked him to lunch; they became friends, and I also went to Columbia University, partly inspired by Edward Said in the late ’80s.

SARAH MOWASWES I’m Palestinian American, and I can’t speak for every Palestinian American, but I think a lot of us go through this spiritual awakening at some point in our lives that routes us through Edward. 1967 was this huge awakening for him, as someone who denied his identity and then came into it. And I feel that a lot of Palestinian Americans, whether it was October 7 or previously, had that seismic shift in their life where they had denied who they were and now were embracing it. When I did that, it was very much through Edward Said. But my mom grew up in Gaza, my dad’s Palestinian and grew up in Kuwait, and they don’t actually know who Edward Said is. I think that is very common for people on the ground in Palestine to not know him because his work is in English and it’s very much speaking to a Western audience.

Was the plan always to make the film independently?

BAIRD We were always planning to make it independently, so that we could control how it came out. This kind of topic, I think, it is very important to make it independently and then to seek distribution.

Did you ever consider a traditional talking head approach for the film?

BAIRD When I first thought of the idea, I definitely thought, “Who should I interview?” But then when I started to listen to The Pen and the Sword lectures, of which there are about 45 lectures that David Barsamian did with him and recorded, I immediately knew that [the doc] would need to be archival and in his voice, because no one speaks better for the cause and for the history and the experience than Edward Said.

MOWASWES We had about six months to a year of hunting and gathering of material before we really got into the edit. There’s no way through an archival documentary except quite literally watching every single piece of archive and listening to every single piece of material, so that was very much our process. There was a funny experience after we pitched the film at CPH:DOX two years ago. Through that process, Swedish and Dutch broadcasters reached out to us and said they had a bunch of interviews with Edward, and are we interested in using them? Those weren’t even on our radar. We had so much material from all of the American news organizations and about eight hours of personal archive that his father took in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s that are 8mm black-and-white footage. Even to this day, there are people who reach out and are like, “I have a photo of Edward. I have this interview that I did with him from Japanese radio.” It was like every corner of the earth, somehow, Edward was there at some point or another.

From that process, what was one piece of archival material that felt like a true hidden gem?

BAIRD The 8mm footage that his father had taken of Palestine before Israel was created and of Said as a child with his sisters in his house in Jerusalem. It was just an absolute godsend, that material, and it was all on these old 8mm reels in a box in his wife’s apartment in New York. It made it so clear it needed to be an archival film. We needed to see that world before it changed so much.

MOWASWES Edward returns to Palestine for the first time in 1992, and your introduction into the film are these photos that his daughter Najla Said took when she was 18. There’s the stark understanding of whether this place even exists anymore in this way. And the answer is, a lot of the time, no. And are the people in these photographs still living? And there was something both beautiful and haunting about including that in the film.

How did you navigate making a film about a man that also speaks directly to an incredibly charged global political moment?

MOWASWES [This film] was not made in a vacuum in any way. Every day, we were thinking about the genocide. Every day, we were thinking about what was happening in Palestine and also the U.S.’ role in it. Every time we watched a piece of archive, that was always the guiding principle: How can this explain today to a Western audience who may be overwhelmed or unfamiliar with what is happening? Obviously, making a film independently is an uphill battle, but for us, it was a way to connect with individuals — both financiers, production partners, even festival programmers — who took a risk on this film. It has been like this really special way of making this film, where we now have a small army of really dedicated fans and a base that we can call upon to help bring this out into the world. Traditional distribution might have stopped this film from being as politically explicit as it is. Or, things get buried on platforms all the time. And we just didn’t want to have those restrictions.

What are some of the lessons learned from Palestinian filmmakers or filmmakers with films set in and around Palestine?

MOWASWES We’re up against the big distributors. The big distributors really can boast about how they want films like this made, and they want films from unique voices or from different diasporas, but they’re not actually taking those risks. What we’re learning from these filmmakers are these new, creative ways of distribution. Something we learned a lot from Cherien Dabis, who did All That’s Left of You, was the importance of finding an audience online. We’re working with a social media company to create a conversation and material online to build an audience that we can deploy once the film comes out. BAIRD I’ve just been amazed by our social media campaign. We had all this footage that didn’t make it into the film that we’ve put into teasers that we’ve put on our social media and they’ve exploded. I think Edward Said would have loved social media because he had this whole concept of permission to narrate and who controls the narrative. With social media, it’s people to people.

Speaking of social media, do you have a sense of how young audiences are interacting with your film? Many young people who are becoming aware of Palestinian history were very young or even born after Said’s death.

MOWASWES I think a benefit of the film is that it’s very much a film on Edward, obviously, but it’s also a film on Palestine. Palestine is very much a central character of the film. There is a huge younger audience that has not been exposed to Edward’s work whatsoever, and that’s a really exciting audience for us because we’re seeing public opinion shifting in the United States pretty dramatically among younger audiences who support Palestine. We’re seeing our friends who are making these other Palestinian films and how younger audiences are going to see their films.

What was it like to be making this documentary during a period of time where sentiment toward Palestine and the war in Gaza was rapidly shifting in the U.S.?

BAIRD We didn’t change how we made the documentary, but it is an incredible thing. In the past three years, the whole conversation, the sentiment, the awareness have shifted entirely. [In a 2026 Gallup poll, among those aged 18 to 34, 53 percent said they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.] More than half of Americans are pro-Palestine, and hopefully this film will land, so that people can really understand the actual history there and how it all started from arguably the most famous, eloquent Palestinian American speaking in English.

You are also putting out this doc at a time when Hollywood itself is grappling with conversations about Israel and Palestine. What are you thinking about as you get ready to put this film in front of an industry audience?

MOWASWES This is a great opportunity for a Hollywood audience to challenge themselves on a film like this and to really receive it. We have some heavy-hitting EPs like Alex [Gibney], Jocelyn Barnes, Geralyn Dreyfous and Jenny Raskin of Impact Partners. We put together a robust team because we really wanted to say, ‘Look at these heavy hitters in the industry who are supporting this film.’ It’s saying to Hollywood, if you care deeply about this issue and you care deeply about audiences who are driving theatrical these days, then you would support a film like this. It’s an opportunity to have a conversation with Hollywood and say the old models aren’t working. We know they aren’t working. Independent filmmakers are frustrated. Even executives at these companies are frustrated and feeling like they’re going to be fired for supporting a film like this. It’s really a test of Hollywood to say: Let’s make something work, and let’s try to change what is broken.