Narrative provides accountability, testimony and power. Gazan filmmakers are the bravest filmmakers today, understanding that a frame, even shot through a phone, can change the perception of millions of people. But we should remember that this isn’t about discussing images and aesthetics. It is securing the material life of millions of people in Gaza and occupied Palestine.

This is the third Thessaloniki International Festival during the current iteration of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. What does film or art mean in times of genocide? This is indeed the most urgent question of our times.

As a Palestinian filmmaker in the diaspora, I acknowledge that my embodied experience and reality is radically different than Palestinians living in Gaza and all of occupied Palestine during the past 2 years and 77 years. That difference demands a duty and responsibility to witness, act and resist the status quo that normalises or even desires genocide. While witnessing my people being killed from a distance with such ease and lack of accountability really made me reflect not only on the way Palestinians are being annihilating in the present but also how the foundations have been established way before the Nakba of 1948 and the foundation of Israel.

In my own film and research work I look at Scottish colonial archives from the 1930s and 1940s, archives that undoubtedly present a land that doesn’t exist in this way anymore. However, the colonial gaze feels constant and present. It’s the same gaze we see in Western media that dehumanise Palestinian life and Palestinian death, the same gaze that manufactures consent for more violence, that erases Palestinian presence. The same gaze that feeds fascism in the West by prosecuting pro-Palestine activists and that funds more and more weapons sold to Israel.
Back in the 1960s, Frantz Fanon reminds us that French colonialism in Algeria was developed on the assumption that it would last forever. It didn’t. It changes form, adapting, growing, fighting back pressure. It’s not a fixed reality but an alive power seeking to learn from past mistakes, past losses. Film and art need to adapt too. They need to be reimagined as a force of action, as tools against injustice. Filmworkers need to use their creativity that has been spent into thinking film structure, plot and resolution in (also) thinking about structuring their political organising, addressing narrative potholes by governmental propaganda and finding resolutions and solutions to the biggest questions of our day. For Palestinians, narrative has never been about entertainment or escape, it has always been about survival. Narrative provides accountability, testimony and power. Gazan filmmakers are the bravest filmmakers today, understanding that a frame, even shot through a phone, can change the perception of millions of people. But we should remember that this isn’t about discussing images and aesthetics. It is securing the material life of millions of people in Gaza and occupied Palestine. Festivals provide important platforms and bring their legacies, sometimes cultivated for decades, that could offer a brave stance countering the normalisation (or even benefit from the) world around us.

This is the third Thessaloniki International Festival during the current iteration of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This exact text could have been written verbatim 2 years ago today. But each “today” lies in the future we hold. Today is way too late for the dead to come back but today is the only time when their memory can live in dignity and respect. This is to all our colleagues forgotten, abandoned and erased by the people and institutions that were supposed to protect them.

Free Palestine and end Fascism everywhere.