Amongst the rubble and tents, amid the noise of generators, jets and drones that continue to cross the skies of Gaza, people imagine hearing, sweet as a whisper, “And now, the screening is about to begin: please remain silent.” And the cinema will have a screen that blends with the clouds; it will serve as a crossroads in Deir El-Balah. The cinema will have its screen on a wall scarred by fewer bullets than the others. It will be an open space, cleared of rubble and debris. The movie theatre, without any walls or a roof, will be filled with people of all ages, along with their stories and wounds, their courage and their resistance.

To imagine a screening in Gaza requires a fervent, almost audacious imagination. To organise a festival, then, is almost “mission impossible”, but the limits of the impossible and the unimaginable have been exceeded far too many times in Gaza. And so, once again, we push past these limits for something truly exceptional and extraordinary: organising the Gaza International Festival for Women's Cinema, in Deir el-Balah, in the heart of the Strip, from 26-31 October.

First announced at Venice (see the news), the Gaza International Festival for Women's Cinema has grown amid all the uncertainties and challenges that Gaza's population has been experiencing on the ground. If, during the evacuation of Gaza City, it seemed clear that the festival could not take place, except perhaps in some online form, a few weeks later, the plausibility of holding the event became concrete again, lending cinema the role of an amplifier of hope and resistance.

The first edition will open with Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Kaouther Ben Hania
scheda film], being screened for the first time in the Arab world. The programme will feature nearly 80 films, including documentaries, shorts and fiction features from 28 countries. Some 80 windows onto the world for a population that has lived under siege for too many years. The selected movies tell of the lives, voices and struggles of women.

The honorary president is Monica Maurer, a filmmaker and researcher who has worked for decades on Palestinian visual memory. There are two juries: one for fiction films and one for documentaries. The fiction jury is chaired by French writer-director Céline Sciamma, joined by Moroccan director Mohamed El Younsi, Italian actress Jasmine Trinca, Palestinian writer-director Fajr Yacoub, and Algerian actress and theatre director Moni Boualam.

Annemarie Jacir, director of the film Palestine 36 [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], which is in the running for the Oscars, representing Palestine (see the news), chairs the documentary jury, along with Bahraini producer Bassim Al Thawadi, Italian producer Graziella Bildesheim (president of the European Women's Audiovisual Network), Kuwaiti director Abdulaziz Al-Sayegh and Cuban editor Maricet Sancristobal.

The date chosen to open the festival harks back to Palestinian Women's Day and the first Palestinian Women's Conference held in Jerusalem in 1929.

The roots that make the gathering possible branch out into a rich network of international solidarity associations. It was founded by Ezzaldeen Shalh, a filmmaker and holder of a PhD in Cinema. The former president of the Jerusalem Film Festival and the International Union of Arab Cinema lost his home and part of his family, and now lives in a tent, and he believes in cinema (and the festival) as a form of resistance, a way to assert one’s existence, and a political and moral declaration. “This is not a festival about Gaza, but with Gaza, and from Gaza to the world.”