FOR LIFE

Synopsis

"A Palestinian woman undertakes a secret and risky journey to smuggle her husband’s sperm out of prison. As her longing for motherhood meets political reality, an intimate personal struggle unfolds into a quiet act of endurance and resistance." For more than twenty years, Hind has lived a marriage shaped by absence. Her spouse is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison, one of thousands of Palestinian men incarcerated far from their families. Visits are rare, physical contact is forbidden, and intimacy is impossible. Yet Hind still dreams of becoming a mother. Through an extraordinary underground network, Palestinian prisoners have found a way to smuggle their sperm out of prison, allowing their wives to conceive through IVF. The film follows Hind through the intimate stages of this journey: secret phone calls, medical appointments, moments of hope, and devastating uncertainty. Interwoven with Hind’s story are the voices of other women, doctors, and former prisoners who reveal the human cost of incarceration beyond prison walls. The film moves between domestic spaces and heavily restricted institutions, showing how love, desire, and parenthood persist even under extreme control. Told entirely through real-time observation, the film reframes motherhood not as a private desire, but as a space shaped by power, control, and enforced absence. It offers an intimate, restrained portrait of women whose bodies become quiet sites of resistance, and of lives suspended between waiting, hope, and the cost of endurance.

Credits

Director

Ahmet Seven