The Zochrot’s annual 48mm Film Festival will show on its closing night the documentary “1948: Creation & Catastrophe,” co-directed by Ahlam Muhtaseb, a professor of communication studies at Cal State San Bernardino.

The documentary, which focuses on the creation of the state of Israel and its impact on Palestinians, was made with filmmaker Andy Trimlett. It will be shown on Dec. 3 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and the Left Bank Cine Club.

Zochrot (“remembering” in Hebrew) is a non-governmental organization that has, since 2002, worked to “promote acknowledgement and accountability for the ongoing injustices of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 and the reconceptualization of the Return as the imperative redress of the Nakba and a chance for a better life for all the country's inhabitants,” according to its website.

Zochrot’s 5th annual 48mm Film Festival brings together cinematic works dealing with the Nakba and the return of Palestinian refugees from various perspectives and in different places and times.

The Nakba, which is also known as the 1948 Palestinian exodus, occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Palestinian War, known in Hebrew as the War of Independence or the War of Liberation on the establishment of the state of Israel.

“1948: Creation & Catastrophe,” nearly nine years in the making, has been a massive research project. Muhtaseb and Trimlett did more than 90 interviews, poured over 20,000 pages of historical documents, collected more than 1,400 photographs from three dozen sources, combed through hours of archival film and gathered dozens of documents from Israeli military archives.

The documentary looks to the pivotal year that David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel and how that impacted the Middle East as seen through the eyes of the people who lived it.

More on the documentary can be found on its website.