Leila Khaled: Hijacker (2006)

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