A: I am thinking through a question posed by a friend from the Feminist Frames collective.

For myself—as a Kurdish woman filmmaker living in Turkey, I found myself asking again, through the lens of Palestine: “How can one make cinema in times of genocide?”

This summer, I met a friend living in exile in Greece. She told me there were demonstrations for Palestine every day, that joining them made her feel alive again, and then she added: “Didn’t we, in Turkey, grow up supporting Palestine since childhood? Why is nothing happening there now, why isn’t there the same kind of mobilization?”

On the way back, I kept thinking: Why indeed? When I landed, I realized something: In this land, which has passed through smaller-scale massacres, we -women, the poor, LGBTQ+ people, children, workers, Kurds, Alevis, and so many others- might have turned our sense of protest and resistance into something close to futility. With tens of thousands of political prisoners still in jails, perhaps we have come to believe, deep down, that resistance no longer matters. The weariness of action has turned into a quiet acceptance.

Then I look at my children, showing me videos about Palestine with horror, or hear my students say, “When I think of Palestine, I feel like I’m living in chaos,” and I realize how heavy seeing can be. The images I see -those I actually wish I had not seen- trap me in a state of frozen witnessing, bringing me to what the poet said: “Time stops in wounds.” And I freeze there.

Is this paralysis, or a crisis of the ethical threshold? Could I go on living as if I had never seen those images? Could I, as Sontag suggests, learn to look at my own act of looking? Could I bear witness -without pretending to suffer in the place of those who suffer?

This paralysis, this suspended state, immediately brings to mind Benjamin, Adorno, Levinas, and Blanchot, perhaps they arrive from memory, by reflex. I sometimes think about the irony of their connection to the question of Palestine, and yet, they no longer help me move through this paralysis. Perhaps the answer does not come from the conceptual gaze upon catastrophe, but from the cinema born of the lived experience of catastrophe itself, from Palestinian filmmakers. From Elia Suleiman’s quiet irony, to Mai Masri’s accounts of childhood, to Annemarie Jacir’s camera tracing resistance through the everyday, and from the images brought to us by others whose names I do not even know.

Their cinema speaks from a wounded stillness, creating language out of devastation. It gestures toward another form of justice, another ethical stance, shaking the suspended bodies we have become.

So when I find myself asking, what does it even mean to make films during a massacre? I realize their cinema carries us from the impossibility of witnessing and filmmaking to the insistence of witnessing and the possibility of cinema itself. Even if this possibility emerges slowly, hesitantly, from our frozen selves, perhaps the imperfect, fragmented, trembling images we will release are the only things capable of touching children, youth, resistors, and the frozen time, the suspended justice, to which we all still belong.

T: The question “how can one make cinema in times of genocide?” has stayed with me for a long time. As a Kurdish woman filmmaker in Turkey, I have often thought about what it means to create cinema in an environment marked, though differently, by conflict and violence. The scale of what is happening in Palestine cannot and should not be compared to what we experience here. Yet A’s question struck me deeply, because it touches something both personal and universal: what does it mean to make fi lms when destruction becomes a constant condition of life? 

I’ve often wondered whether making films is a lesser act than direct resistance, a retreat into a safer ground. But over time, I’ve come to see that cinema need not be measured against other forms of struggle to matter. It can stand as a form of resistance and testimony on its own. The question, then, is also one of ethics: how to bear witness without appropriating another’s pain?

Thinking about Palestine brings me back to the idea of imperfect cinema. In the face of atrocity, the weight of what is shown can make aesthetics feel secondary, even unethical. To search for beauty in devastation risks domesticating the violence. The “imperfections” in fi lms made during genocide, I believe, carry their own political force -signs of survival and resistance. Palestinian filmmakers embody this most powerfully: their cinema speaks from within destruction, not about it.

Mahdi Fleifel’s I Signed a Petition illustrates this. The film unfolds entirely through a phone call between Fleifel and a friend, as he questions whether signing a petition against Israel could endanger his right to return home to Palestine. His trembling voice and the quiet, distant urban images on screen create a tense, fragile space. This refusal of spectacle becomes its politics, it testifi es without beautifying.

In Turkey, we live under a constant atmosphere of self-censorship. Even without overt bans, there’s an internalised pressure to remain silent, which seeps into artistic expression and creates collective paralysis. In such a context, Palestinian cinema becomes even more vital. It reminds us that despite fear and suppression, fi lm can still serve as a space of memory and resistance.

There may be no single way to respond to this urgent moment, but the direction is clear. In the cultural field, a broad boycott remains essential. Institutions and festivals that claim neutrality while remaining complicit in oppression must be challenged. Silence is not neutrality -it is complicity. What we need are acts of radical visibility: letters, collective statements, refusals that turn solidarity into action.

FF: We all agree that cultural and economic boycott is crucial. Severing economic and financial ties with companies and institutions that provide material support of the genocide and the occupation. Understanding that the consequences of severing those ties are distributed unequally between people.

N: Above all, we must keep the issue alive, through every tool, gesture, and form of expression we possess. Those who remain silent, indifferent, or hide behind conditional statements, the ones who say “yes, but” can be left behind. Their judgmental tone and hypocrisy have already become another burden for us to carry. Our energy should be directed toward what the people of Palestine are asking for: to come together, to organise, to keep the resistance and Palestine alive wherever we are. The greatest challenge of this moment is despair.

And yet, as often as we fall into it, we must find ways to resist it. Political inertia serves no one.

As a Palestinian comrade once said, the people of Palestine do not have the luxury of hopelessness. Then neither do we. We will hope, we will build hope, and wherever we stand, we will demand action from our governments — to end complicity, to halt trade and the traffic of arms. We will hold accountable the institutions, corporations, and individuals who lend support to genocide.

Ro: I don’t think people’s actions will have any signifi cant impact on the outcome of the Palestinian genocide. The erasing of the Palestinian populations to serve the Zionist possession of more land has shown us that we the people are accessories to neoliberal economic goals. Despite this, and maybe because of this: 

«La mejor lucha es la que se hace sin esperanza» Francesc Sabaté, quoted by the Democracia artist collective.

R: When, as N mentioned, Omar Barghouti said that Palestinians do not have the luxury of giving up hope, I thought of Rosa Luxemburg, whose entire revolutionary commitment was tethered to this idea of disappointment and failure not as an obstacle but as an unavoidable partner on the path towards social transformation not because the revolution is inevitable, but because it is possible, and depends on the strength of our commitment to it.

M: The famous quote from Bertolt Brecht’s “Motto,” written during the Second World War, comes to my mind: “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” This sentence seems to resonate as a guiding principle, an invitation to direct our energy and attention toward darkness, to engage with it and bring it to the surface as a first act of awareness. In order to transform something, we need to expose it first, in a clear and unambiguous way.

FF: Yet ultimately, the question of how to make cinema in times of genocide raises resistance in some of us: should we question this idea of times of genocide as temporally circumscribed? When did it start, when will it end? What happens after? Will cinema go back to what it was before?

G: The Palestinian people have resisted settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the Zionist occupation for more than a century. Today, despite the genocide carried out by Israel with the backing of the United States and the United Kingdom, they continue to fight not only for their land but also for the survival of their collective memory.

Palestinian women bear the heaviest burden of this struggle. They face harassment, rape, torture, and invasive searches; in prisons, torture is timed with their menstrual cycles. Their bodies become battlefi elds, their pain turned into tools of propaganda. While Zionist discourse manipulates feminism to justify occupation, Palestinian women resist both patriarchy and colonial violence.

In every tent, under every ruin, in every woman who cannot stop to mourn, a form of resistance persists: feeding children, tending to the wounded, writing names on the arms of the dead. These acts, small yet immense, are testimonies of endurance and dignity.

To make these testimonies visible is one of cinema’s deepest ethical and political callings. 

Filming under genocide is not merely about recording—it is about insisting on truth. The image becomes a form of defiance, piercing through propaganda and erasure. What the occupier seeks to destroy is not only life itself but also the story of that life. Palestinian fi lmmakers, journalists, and documentarians continue to hold the camera between life and death, declaring to the world: We are here.

The iconic image of the woman in the First Intifada- holding her yellow high-heeled shoes in one hand and a stone in the other as she faces a tank- embodies this spirit of defiance. Today, the camera takes the place of that stone: a weapon of witnessing, of remembering, of refusing silence. The power of cinema lies not only in what it shows, but in its refusal to look away.

R: The other day I heard Khadijeh Habashneh say that Palestinian cinema started with one woman, Sulafa Jadallah. With Hani Jawharieh and Mustafa Abu Ali they were the first cinema unit to join the armed struggle of a liberation movement in the sixties. Images of Palestine from previous decades were all in Israeli and British museums, so their mission became that of documenting everything, showing Palestine to the world.

E: Yesterday at the Athens Palestine Film Festival, we watched Ambulance by Mohamed Jabaly, filmed during the 2014 Gaza bombing. In the Q&A, Jabaly said he wished he had never made this film — that he would have liked to make other images of Gaza. He later stressed that it would not be possible for him to make films in Gaza now.

For non-Palestinian filmmakers, it is easier to take distance and film images of genocide and enter them into the global film market and festivals. Jabaly’s statement, of his inability to make triggering images, was echoed in the selection of short films by Palestinian directors screened at the festival — films filled with love, grief, humour, and resilience.

It is easier for non-Palestinian filmmakers to make or reproduce images where we witness their subjects and makers die. It is an extraction of sorts, producing empathetic images of martyrs from a place of safety. Not that we do not need empathy, or that we should close our eyes to the images and sounds of genocide, but we need an empathy that leads to direct action. A cinema full of sobbing, helpless viewers listening to The Voice of Hind Rajab only makes sense if this audience takes a pledge to support Palestine’s liberation no matter what.

Sharing life and creating together with people who have experienced war, migration, and ethnic cleansing makes me angry with the colonial capitalist political system that creates and supports regimes of oppression, closes borders, and enforces dehumanizing migration policies that turn people full of life and dreams into shadows of themselves.

Through our work, resistance and solidarity are the moments when my friends and colleagues can rest, get properly paid, and forget themselves in small moments of joy, pride and creativity — moments when their trauma sleeps, and they can be carefree, whoever they want to be (as most Western artists can afford to be). These may be fleeting moments, but they keep us alive and fighting for a future free from oppression.

Sadly, a cinema of migrant joy does not make money in the cultural market — no “larger-than-life” storytelling in small acts of affirmation. Most circuits of cinema are built for Western eyes to enjoy. So many times, with The Post Collective (the small migrant collective in Belgium I am part of), we have been tokenised by programmers and othered by Western audiences. But the most important moments for us are when migrant and diasporic audiences and colleagues reach out and see their feelings, hopes, and experiences reflected in the work, when we network together to create other spaces outside institutional control.

We make art to change society and inspire people to take collective and individual action.

R: On empathy: I don’t know if you remember, but about a year into the war on Gaza, some of us went to a screening of a film co-directed by a European filmmaker. She’d compiled footage from publicly available documentation of the genocide -stuff produced by Gazans on the ground, a lot of it pulled from YouTube. During the Q&A, the director was joined online by a young Gazan doctor who’d managed to escape to Egypt and appeared briefly in the film. He spoke in English with a translator there for the Italian audience. His words were full of gratitude for the film’s support and for our solidarity to Palestinians, and the translator expertly rendered all this into Italian. That is, until a journalist on the panel suggested that what was happening in Gaza was like a jungle. The young doctor said he wanted to correct the journalist- that it wasn’t like a jungle, because in the jungle the strongest win, and if Palestinians weren’t under occupation and had access to weapons the way Israelis did, they would have beaten them. Those of us who spoke English understood what he said, but somehow the translator skipped over this comment, muttering under her breath that she hadn’t quite caught it. Olivier Marboeuf says that « empathy in societies of innocence is a narcissistic form of projection onto others that involves no commitment to equality […] the empathetic eye wants Palestinians to be exactly as it desires. » As soon as the young Palestinian doctor deviated from the image of the victim, he became illegible- because it would have been too unsettling to see him differently. The empathetic eye brought him back into the fold of victimhood so that he may deserve our support.

FF: This reminds us again that we need more cinema of resistance, less of victimhood.