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Palestine Film Institute, 58 Main Street, Jerusalem (2026)

26/08/2026

Seasons 6 of the Palestine Film Platform concludes with a dialogue between two animated short films, Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) by Amanda Strong and Mariam by Dana Durr. Through stop-motion and hand-drawn animation, these films extend the programme’s exploration of storytelling beyond the conventions of colonial realism, creating worlds shaped by ancestry, spirituality, mythology, and Indigenous relationships to land. Together, they embrace animation to imagine worlds where ancestry, memory, kinship, and relationships to land remain alive, opening possibilities for Indigenous futures grounded in connection and continuity. Streaming at palestinefilminstitute.org through September 2nd.

Thank you to the film teams, and to the curators of our August program "Indigenous Cinemas in Conversation", Aida Kaadan and Gabrielle Nour Kacha.

19/08/2026

The third week of our August program "Indigenous Cinemas in Conversation" turns to the psychological afterlives of colonialism through Christopher Kahunahana’s Waikiki, exploring alienation, fractured belonging, and the invisible ways colonial powers continue to inhabit Indigenous lives. Throughout week 2 and 3, though separated by four decades and distinct geographies, the films blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reflecting storytelling traditions where lived experience, memory, and imagination remain intertwined. The boundaries between reality, memory, dreams, and imagination remain deliberately porous and expand the cinematic languages through which relationships to land, identity, and belonging can be understood. Streaming at palestinefilminstitute.org through August 26th.

يتناول الأسبوع الثالث من البرنامج الآثار النفسية المستمرة للاستعمار من خلال فيلم كريستوفر كاهوناهانا «وايكيكي» (Waikiki)، مستكشفًا الاغتراب والانتماء المتصدّع والطرائق غير المرئية التي تواصل من خلالها القوى الاستعمارية السكن في حياة الشعوب الأصلية.
وخلال الأسبوعين الثاني والثالث، وعلى الرغم من أن أربعة عقود ومساحات جغرافية مختلفة تفصل بين الفيلمين، فإن كليهما يطمس الحدود بين الوثائقي والروائي، ويعكس تقاليد سردية تظل فيها التجربة المعاشة والذاكرة والخيال متداخلة.
وتبقى الحدود بين الواقع والذاكرة والأحلام والمخيّلة مفتوحة ومرنة عن قصد، بما يوسّع اللغات السينمائية التي يمكن من خلالها فهم العلاقات بالأرض والهوية والانتماء.

12/08/2026

For the second week of our August programme, our focus shifts from the politics of the archive to the everyday experience of dispossession through Michel Khleifi's Fertile Memory, a landmark work of Palestinian cinema that traces how colonial violence reshapes memory, belonging, and daily life for Palestinians who remained after the Nakba. Throughout week 2 and 3, though separated by four decades and distinct geographies, the films blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reflecting storytelling traditions where lived experience, memory, and imagination remain intertwined. The boundaries between reality, memory, dreams, and imagination remain deliberately porous and expand the cinematic languages through which relationships to land, identity, and belonging can be understood.

ينتقل الأسبوع الثاني من سياسات الأرشيف إلى التجربة اليومية للاقتلاع، من خلال فيلم ميشيل خليفي «الذاكرة الخصبة» (Fertile Memory)، وهو عمل مفصلي في تاريخ السينما الفلسطينية، يتتبّع الكيفية التي يعيد بها العنف الاستعماري تشكيل الذاكرة والانتماء والحياة اليومية للفلسطينيين الذين بقوا في وطنهم بعد النكبة.
وخلال الأسبوعين الثاني والثالث، وعلى الرغم من أن أربعة عقود ومساحات جغرافية مختلفة تفصل بين الفيلمين، فإن كليهما يطمس الحدود بين الوثائقي والروائي، ويعكس تقاليد سردية تظل فيها التجربة المعاشة والذاكرة والخيال متداخلة.
وتبقى الحدود بين الواقع والذاكرة والأحلام والمخيّلة مفتوحة ومرنة عن قصد، بما يوسّع اللغات السينمائية التي يمكن من خلالها فهم العلاقات بالأرض والهوية والانتماء.

05/08/2026

For the final month of the sixth season of the Palestine Film Platform, curators Gabrielle Nour Kacha and Aida Kadaan present "Indigenous Cinemas in Conversation." This program explores Indigenous cinema through both its stories and its forms, asking how Indigenous filmmakers create cinematic languages, rhythms, and ways of seeing that emerge from their own histories and relationships to land. By bringing Palestinian cinema together with Indigenous cinemas across Turtle Island and Hawai’i, the programme moves through different moments of the colonial experience, from dispossession and rupture to survival, renewal, and futurity.

Indigenous Cinemas in Conversation opens with a dialogue between two short films that interrogate the politics of representation and the possibilities of reclaiming the archive. Asinnajaq's Three Thousand reworks archival images through animation to reconsider the cinematic history of Inuit representation, while Theo Panagopoulos's The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing unearthes colonial footage from British Mandate Palestine to interrogate its colonial gaze, asking how Indigenous filmmakers can confront, reinterpret, and reclaim images produced and withheld by colonial apparatus.

04/08/2026

Call for Project-In-Progress
Palestine Showcase at IDFA 2026
Deadline: August 31st, 2026

The Palestine Film Institute (PFI) invites Palestinian filmmakers and producers from all around the world, as well as those working with film projects centred on Palestine, to submit their film projects in-progress for the Palestine Film Hub showcase at IDFA. Selected projects will have the opportunity to pitch in front of a curated audience of industry leaders, festival programmers, and potential financiers at IDFA 2026.

This year’s showcase will host a special project from Sudan to support our fellow Sudanese filmmakers. We invite Sudanese filmmakers to apply with their projects-in-progress. Through this initiative, we aim to promote solidarity across borders and support a film centered on Sudan.

Despite the escalating threats to the Palestinian narrative, the PFI reaffirms the vital role of cinema as a tool of resistance alongside the ongoing Palestinian struggle, and remains committed to the urgent necessity of supporting Palestinian films in international forums.

In partnership with IDFA, PFI is honoured to present the Palestine Showcase at the festival market. These events have become an important event for supporting Palestinian filmmakers and ensuring their stories reach international audiences, funders, and decision-makers.

An international jury will choose up to four projects from Palestine including a Sudanese Film project to be presented at this year’s IDFA, which will receive:
-Participation at IDFA 2026.
-Strategic coaching from PFI industry experts.
-Accreditation, accommodation, and logistical support to attend the festival.

For submission check our website (bio)
Poster design Hamza Abu Ayyash

22/07/2026

We conclude our July program curated by Third Cinema Days by reclaiming the narrative through art and performance. Neo Nahda explores cross-dressing and q***r archives in the Levant as a resistance to colonial modernity. Parajanov uses the naïve art of Pirosmani to construct a surreal, textured identity that defies Soviet realism. Both films argue that Liberation is an aesthetic act—a reclaiming of our bodies, our history, and our beauty. Streaming at palestinefilminstitute.org through July 29th.

Neo Nahda (2023)
12m | Dir. May Ziadé
Mona, a young woman in London, finds archive photographs of Arab women crossdressing in the 1920s. Somewhere between her fantasies and reality, she starts a feverish journey of uncovering lost histories and her own identity. Through a coming-of-age narrative, the film explores the euphoric relationship those who are marginalised create with images and symbols, and how archive images can be a portal for the world of inner projections, creating meaning and grounding one's identity.

Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme (1985)
25m | Dir. Sergei Parajanov
A documentary film about the great Georgian outsider artist Niko Pirosmani. By filming the detail and themes of his colourful paintings, Parajanov creates an engaging and mysterious portrait of Georgia itself.

21/07/2026

Meet the Palestine delegation to Getting Real ‘26. Join us tomorrow, in person and online, for a panel discussion presenting their documentary projects, alongside an honest discussion of the some hard questions: what ethical funding for Palestinian documentary actually looks like, what responsibilities festivals bear in bringing these stories to screen, and what freedom of expression and protection from censorship mean for filmmakers working today.

12pm at JANM- What We Can Learn from Palestinian Documentary.

Panelists: Khalil al Mozian (Memory of the Senses), Sarah Moweswes (Edward Said: Between Worlds), Hana Elias (If These Stones Could Talk), Jameelah Shelo (Fractured).

20/07/2026

Identity—and the way it manifests in documentary—is not monolithic. Palestinians are divided not only by occupation, displacement, and siege, but dispersed across the world in contexts of migration, exile, and cultural hybridity. Yet international documentary culture has often flattened this multiplicity into a single story of crisis and loss, leaving little room for the full range of what Palestinian filmmakers are actually making, or for honest conversation about how that work gets funded and shown.

The Palestine Film Institute (PFI), dedicated to preserving and promoting Palestinian cinema beyond its most visible narratives, brings a delegation of four filmmakers with documentary projects currently in development to Getting Real ‘26. Each will present a short clip from their work-in-progress before the conversation opens to the harder questions: what ethical funding for Palestinian documentary actually looks like, what responsibilities festivals bear in bringing these stories to screen, and what freedom of expression and protection from censorship mean for filmmakers working today.

Moderator: Casey Asprooth-Jackson (Palestine Film Institute)
Panelists: Khalil Mozian (Memory of the Senses), Sarah Moweswes (Edward Said: Between Worlds), Hana Elias (If These Stones Could Talk), Jameelah Shelo (Fractured)

17/07/2026

For the third week of July, we reach the emotional core of Third Cinema Day's program for the PFP. We move through three stages of loss: the immediate destruction of the home (Saab); the haunting silence that remains after war (Jashi); and the heartbreaking necessity of exile (Azhari). It is a journey from the ruins of the city to the boat leaving the shore. Beirut, My City (1983) by Jocelyne Saab, Speechless (2009) by Salomé Jashi and The Magic Boat (2019) by Naaman Azhari are free to stream at palesitnefilminstitute.org through July 22nd.

Beirut, My City (1983)
Dir. Jocelyne Saab
In July 1982 the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. Four years earlier Jocelyne Saab saw her 150-year-old childhood home go up in flames. She asks herself: when did all this begin? Every place becomes a historical site and every name a memory.

Speechless (2009)
Dir. Salome Jashi
The 2008 Georgia-Russia War resulted in the deaths of several hundred people and expulsion of tens of thousands from South Ossetia. Is there a way to show the tragedy of families that lost their loved ones, thousands of people forced to leave their homes, soldiers doing the fighting, and children who cannot comprehend the situation? Salomé Jashi answers this question in a way that leaves few apathetic, though the horrors of war are never visible on the screen. Her short film is based on an interesting formula of making the audience witness to a tragedy it never sees.

The Magic Boat (2019)
Dir. Naaman Azhari
The Magic Boat is about escapism and hope. The film explores how a mother uses a child’s imagination to navigate harsh realities, transforming pain into wonder whilst they’re about to embark on the most dangerous journey of their lives.

08/07/2026

In our second week, Third Cinema Days Tbilisi presents a visual dialogue on how the state engineers the landscape to control movement. Aslanishvili examines the railway as a tool of geopolitical power in the Caucasus, while Aljafari exposes Israel's aerial surveillance of Palestine. A State in a State (2022) by Tekla Aslanishvili and UNDR (2024) by Kamal Aljafari available to stream at palestinefilminstitute.org through July 15th.

A State in a State (2022)
Experimental, 47m
Dir. Tekla Aslanishvili
A State in a State traces the construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions, observing how these transport infrastructures have come to materialise the fragile political borders that re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film revolves around the scenes of delay and waiting that constitute cargo mobility, countering optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road and examining how the iron foundation of connectivity is used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage.

UNDR (2024)
Experimental, 15m
Dir. Kamal Aljafari
Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion into the Palestinian landscape.

Palestine Film Institute

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12/08/2026

05/08/2026

04/08/2026

22/07/2026

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