10/09/2026 - A Global Sumud Flotilla boat landed on the Lido carrying the message that the festival didn’t want to officially embrace despite having selected films from the occupied country

Ahead of the Venice Film Festival, by means of a letter signed by more than a thousand important figures from the world of cinema and culture, from directors to Nobel laureates, star actresses and international academics, the collective Venice4Palestine (V4P) asked its management to raise the Palestinian flag over the Palazzo del Cinema, which The Biennale refused based on the fact that the Italian government has not officially recognised the State of Palestine. As artistic director Alberto Barbera explained, the institution is only able to fly the flags of recognised states, and the request was redirected to Rome instead. The argument may be technical, but behind the bureaucracy of the denied flag lies a political choice: the refusal to name a country that the festival itself celebrates through two films, Ahmed Hassouna’s Citizen Osama and Muayad Alayan’s Conversation with the Sea.

To this official silence, V4P, together with the Global Sumud Flotilla and Morion Laboratorio Occupato, responded on 7 September with a direct gesture hosted by Isola Edipo: thus, a Flotilla boat landed at the Lido, carrying voices, bodies, humanity and resistance, and the Palestinian flag itself. Amongst the activists present were Maria Elena Delia, the Global Sumud Flotilla's spokesperson for Italy, and Saif Abukeshek, one of the movement's founders. The flag was raised regardless, also in answer to a message sent by Mona Abuamara, the Palestinian Ambassador to Italy: "When ordinary citizens are ready to take on responsibility in defense of humanitarian principles and international law, what are states willing to do to defend and enforce them?" Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, present on the Lido as the producer of Citizen Osama – whose director, Ahmed Hassouna, could not leave Gaza – echoed her words. Masharawi, who lost his home, family and forty years of archives under the rubble, reminded everyone that raising the flag is indeed important, but that it is no longer enough: Palestinians must be put back at the centre of the debate as human beings and what is needed now is collective action leading to concrete results.

On 8 September, the following day, the mobilisation moved to the Casa degli Autori for the panel "Yet Gaza keeps on burning: what is the point of seeing if we do not act?" There, together with international law experts and representatives of CALP and ANGA, V4P presented a detailed legal document appealing to the Italian Constitution, international law and copyright law, asking them to put an end to the complicity between cultural institutions and those involved in the ongoing genocide in Gaza – not a mere manifesto, but a tool meant to be put to concrete use: a legal shield for those who face, by exposing their voice and their body, the risk of professional retaliation and pressure, as was the case of Susan Sarandon, dropped by her agent after speaking out publicly against the genocide. The document was also designed to ensure that the words of those who work in cinema, and beyond, do not become a risk to bear alone.

A presence that added political weight to the meeting was that of Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, who "self-invited" herself to the panel, publicly embracing the demands of V4P's legal document – a gesture linking the message of the film community to that of international law which she herself represents. Speaking from Jerusalem, actor Saleh Bakri, one of the letter’s first signatories, joined in the discussion to call for concrete support from the film industry to the newly founded Gaza Film Academy, a training project for Gaza filmmakers backed by Kaouther Ben Hania, Annemarie Jacir, Mai Masri and Hiam Abbass, amongst others (read the news).

Two days and different types of mobilisations, but a single direction: triggering a shift, at the festival and in the conscience of as many people as possible, from the realm of projected images to that of responsibility. Because the situation in Palestine has become the moral compass of today's and tomorrow's world and because, as the very title of the panel reminds us, the question V4P keeps asking the film community remains the same: what is the point of seeing if we do not act?