Watermelon Pictures Plans December Release for El Sett as It Grows Its Slate
Watermelon Pictures is releasing El Sett in December, co-founder Hamza Ali told Deadline in an interview published on 30 October 2026. The company, which brothers Hamza and Badie Ali launched in April 2024, is also building a development slate aimed at mainstream audiences.
Deadline spoke with the brothers at the El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt, where the company has a film in contention. The documentary American Doctor follows three American physicians of different backgrounds who volunteered in besieged hospitals in Gaza. Its director, Poh Si Teng, is an Oscar nominee and Emmy winner. The film won the Cinema For Humanity Audience Award at the festival's ninth edition.
Watermelon is also the North American distributor of Who Killed Alex Odeh?, a documentary about the 1985 murder of Alex Odeh, an American Palestinian activist, in California. It played in the Feature Documentary Competition at El Gouna.
A distributor buys the rights to show a film in a market and handles its release there. Hamza Ali said Watermelon also works as an international sales agent, which means it sells films to other distributors around the world. He said the company wants to become a global distribution company.
The company's reach has grown through earlier deals. In August 2025, Variety reported that Watermelon had acquired Palestine 36 for North America, with Hamza Ali negotiating the sale with Ossama Bawardi of Philistine Film. The Voice of Hind Rajab went on to become an International Feature Film Oscar nominee in the 2025-26 awards season. Palestine 36 and All That's Left Of You were also shortlisted alongside it.
Badie Ali told Deadline that A-list talent is starting to work with the company, and he linked that to its stance on Palestine. He described a shift in momentum. Hamza Ali said Watermelon will keep championing underrepresented voices from the region and beyond.
The company describes itself as Palestinian-owned, a point Variety noted in May 2025. In February 2026, The Hollywood Reporter described the brothers as building an indie distributor around Palestinian stories and other films the industry is wary of. Watermelon says its mission is to change the mainstream story about Palestinian people and other marginalised communities.
For now, the next date on the calendar is December, when El Sett opens. Whether the development slate reaches mainstream screens will take longer to show, because projects of that kind typically need several years from first idea to release.
