Palestine Film Institute Showcase

As part of efforts to amplify Palestinian voices, the Palestine Film Institute (PFI), in collaboration with IDFA, hosted the Delegation Project Presentation: Palestine Film Institute Showcase on November 17, providing space for “exchange and solidarity” and offering an opportunity to forge alliances that could help bring the showcased projects to international platforms. Four compelling film projects from Palestine were presented during the Showcase: Jenin & the Nakba Between Us by Serene Husni (producers Rula Nasser, Marc Serpa Francoeur), Another Day Shall Come by Aïda Kadaan (producer Aïda Kadaan), The Other Gaza by Wafá Jamil Espvall (producers Wafá Jamil Espvall, co-producer Ulf Boström), and A Disturbed Earth by Rihab Charida (producer Anne Köhncke).

Mohamed Jabaly, a Palestinian filmmaker and artist from Gaza City (Life Is Beautiful, Best Directing award at IDFA 2023), opened the event, saying: “It feels as though we have all failed, as after a year, [our efforts] haven’t stopped what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, in our city. [...]. Coming back here is a statement to the world that we will never give up our voices; we will never give up our stories.”

Echoing this sentiment, Palestinian-British filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky (Tell Spring Not to Come This Year) recalled last year’s PFI Showcase at the festival, noting, “We couldn't have imagined in our worst nightmares that we would still be discussing genocide, and we are still trying to survive genocide a year on. [Nor could we] imagine that we would still be trying to convince some of our beloved institutions to use the word ‘genocide’ to recognize and condemn the genocide because the destruction of culture is a fundamental pillar of the genocide.” The filmmaker stressed that Palestinian culture has been “actively destroyed, suppressed, and criminalized” for 76 years, highlighting that one of the key missions of the PFI is “to reconstitute the Palestinian film archive,” which was “intentionally stolen and in part destroyed” in 1982. Farouky also urged support for Palestinian filmmakers “not merely because they are Palestinian but because they are also incredibly talented artists, [...] who refuse to be defeated.” He further encouraged film festivals and institutions to carefully examine the Industry Protocol in Times of Genocide, which outlines PFI’s demands for action that they can implement.

The first director to take the stage at the Showcase was Serene Husni, a diasporic Palestinian filmmaker based in Toronto. She presented her debut feature documentary project, Jenin & the Nakba Between Us (Jordan, Canada). Showcasing a clip shot in May 2023, Husni shared her desire to create a contemporary portrait of Jenin, the city her parents fled after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank. “But how can you do that in a place constantly [reshaped] by military forces, occupation, and apartheid?” she contemplated during the delegation project presentation. “The film is about me trying to understand Jenin and [find] myself in it, despite having lived in the diaspora my entire life.” Struggling to reconcile her parents’ nostalgic memories with the realities of life in the Palestinian city, she turned to local residents, including farmers, street vendors, taxi drivers, teachers, and elders. “I have a nostalgic gaze stuck in the past. To create a present-day document, I have to see Palestine and Jenin through the eyes of Palestinians living there,” the filmmaker explained. “That’s why, in the film, we are moving through all these places—little islands within the island—and ask Palestinians we encounter along the way: ‘What is it like to live here?’ They help make visible all the forces you can’t [immediately] see: What do Israeli control, apartheid, and military occupation actually look like, even if you don't see soldiers?”

Palestinian filmmaker Aïda Kadaan, based in Haifa, presented her project in development, Another Day Shall Come (Palestine, Qatar, Lebanon), which delves into the inner experiences of Palestinians living in Israel. The film features a collection of anonymous voices, intricately edited into scenes filmed in Palestine within the 1948 borders. Reflecting on her motivations for the project, Kadaan said, “My father is a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. My mother, from Jenin, is officially labeled by Israel as ‘unidentified’ and will remain so on paper. I inherited my father’s Israeli citizenship, but it has always been a burden—a constant reminder of historical trauma carried by me and two million others like me. Nearly two million Palestinians live in Israel, holding Israeli citizenship but identifying as Palestinians. We are what they call ‘the ones who remained’. But this remaining came at a price.” At its core, Another Day Shall Come explores what it means to be a Palestinian in Israel through the voices of 10 Palestinians, who remain anonymous for security reasons and “because they represent all of us—it’s our collective experience,” Kadaan detailed. Since November 2023, these persons have sent the filmmaker voice messages, confiding their experiences, thoughts, and fears as they grapple with this duality and their complex identity. In the film, their voices merge with Kadaan’s, presenting a stream of consciousness in which she too questions her identity, “seeking a home in a place that’s supposed to be home but doesn’t feel like it.”

Moving on to another project in development, Palestinian-Swedish filmmaker Wafá Jamil Espvall presented The Other Gaza (Sweden, Palestine). Blending an observational style with the intimacy of a handheld camera, the film ponders on the “yearning for a place where one can no longer live.” In 2018, after 18 years of separation, Jamil Espvall, who resides in Stockholm, was granted Israeli permission to visit her family following her sister's death. In 2022, still blacklisted by Israel, she traveled to her hometown via Egypt. Unable to visit her family due to the ongoing war, her sole connection to them is now through phone calls. As Jamil Espvall elaborated during the delegation project presentation, the documentary presents “a topography of [her] life, [her] family connection, where joy and hard life [coexist] in Gaza. It provides a deeper understanding of reality in Gaza and, above all, what it means to have a family surviving the genocide.” The filmmaker added, “Palestinians are often depicted as heroes or victims, but we are human beings. We have families. [...]. I want to visit my family whenever I wish, not wait 18 years. Why is it so complicated to be a Palestinian? How can I [pass down] my identity with all this complexity to my daughter?”

Rounding up the Showcase, Beirut-based Palestinian filmmaker Rihab Charida presented her project in late development, A Disturbed Earth (Australia, France, Denmark/Norway, Lebanon). The film traces the journey of Charida and graphic novelist Leila from the Palestinian diaspora as they investigate and gather photographs and clues to reconstruct a visual representation of the lost Palestinian village of Safsaf. These clues, Charida revealed, “become portals into animated scenes, narrated by our elders,” which are interwoven into the documentary. During the delegation project presentation, Charida demonstrated “the last known photograph” of the village, which was obliterated in 1948, with many people massacred, including her relatives. “Survivors, including my then nine-year-old father, made their way on foot to the nearest country, Lebanon, and most of our village community continues to live in and around the refugee camps there to this day. Not only can we not access our villages, but the archival records relating to our villages are also off limits,” she remarked. Speaking of her motivations for making this film, Charida noted that she wished to preserve the stories of her village, as the last generation born there is fading away. She said, “Learning about the theft of the Palestinian film and image archive during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut, and our inability to access our visual history, I wanted to create a visual archive of my village, representing what the colonizer intended [to erase].”