Five documentaries, the longest eleven minutes, carry the opening-night program of the second Gaza International Women’s Film Festival, which began Monday in the roofless remains of the al-Nakheel Hall in al-Bureij, central Gaza. All five were made by the first cohort to come through the Gaza Filmmaking Diploma, a training course that had produced no finished film before this month. The wider festival runs through October 31: 73 films from 24 countries, screened under the slogan “Women Creating Life from Death,” according to Al Jazeera.
The diploma is the supply line that fed the opening slate. Twenty-five Palestinian women began the nine-month course in March 2026, after it was designed in 2024, run jointly with al-Quds Open University and accredited by the Palestinian Ministry of Education. Nine months, start to first public screening, is the whole pipeline: no professional crew, no studio, and, per the same reporting, scarce equipment, limited funding and routine power and internet outages standing in for the ordinary infrastructure of a film school.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Palestinian women | 9-month diploma (started March 2026) | |
| 9-month diploma (started March 2026) | 5 documentaries | produces |
| 5 documentaries | Festival opening (al-Bureij, Oct 26, 2026) | screened |
| 9-month diploma (started March 2026) | Gaza Cinema Academy (launched Venice, Sept 7, 2026) | feeds |
| Gaza Cinema Academy (launched Venice, Sept 7, 2026) | Festival opening (al-Bureij, Oct 26, 2026) | marked at |
| Gaza Cinema Academy (launched Venice, Sept 7, 2026) | Accredited degree (via al-Quds Open University, pending) | aims for |
The five films read like a syllabus in what’s left to film. A Sack of Flour, by Mona Abu Qass, draws on her own hunger during the siege to examine Israel’s use of starvation against the population. Beyond Silence, the directorial debut of the journalist Raghda al-Buhaisi, follows a deaf artist who was never taught to read, write or sign: his Rafah studio was destroyed, his parents and several relatives killed, and after displacement to Deir el-Balah another family helped him build a new one on the roadside. Soso: The Lifeline follows an orphaned child and his donkey, which between them keep other people alive. Remnants of Light tracks a filmmaker working through the loss of her own family and home. Dandana follows a mother whose eight children were all killed, who turns, with the relatives who survived, to song.
Al-Buhaisi says art “turns an individual experience of pain into a visual message.” Ezzaldeen Shalh, who directs the festival, describes the same mechanism at scale: the films turn “individual pain into broader human stories” that the festival exists to keep from going untold.
This is the festival’s second edition. The first ran October 26-31, 2025, in Deir al-Balah, timed to Palestinian Women’s National Day, and opened with a screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatisation of a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza City, which won Ben Hania the Silver Lion at Venice that September. Both editions were founded by Shalh with the Lebanon-based Palestinian director Mai Masri. The backdrop to both is the same war: Gaza’s Health Ministry put the cumulative death toll at 74,561, with 175,759 wounded, as of October 27, 2026, the Palestine Information Center reported. Al-Nakheel Hall, like most of the buildings around it, is a casualty of the same campaign.
From a training diploma to an accredited academy
The festival’s second opening also served as Gaza’s local marking of a launch that had already happened once, in Venice. The Gaza Cinema Academy was formally unveiled on September 7, 2026, at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, co-founded by Shalh and Masri, with backing from Ben Hania, the director Annemarie Jacir, and the actors Hiam Abbass, Ramy Youssef and Saleh Bakri, plus the Italian producer Graziella Bildesheim and the Cairo-based distributor Alaa Karkouti, the National reported. The academy’s stated goal beyond the diploma is a full, accredited filmmaking degree through al-Quds Open University — the same university whose Gaza branch Israeli forces bombed on November 15, 2023, after reportedly using the building as a barracks, Scholars at Risk recorded at the time. Routing a new degree through a university with no functioning campus in the territory it serves is the kind of plan that reads fine in a press release and needs a building, bandwidth and an exam schedule to become real.
In Gaza, cinema is not merely an art form; it is a means of preserving memory, reclaiming our right to shape our own image, and giving a new generation the tools to tell its own story.
What the academy and the diploma share is the resource problem the festival’s co-founder Rima Mahmoud describes: siege conditions have pushed young women toward self-funded projects shot on whatever camera is to hand. “Despite limited resources, these films deserve international exposure,” she said. “Their makers need technical and financial support, translation, and partnerships with festivals and platforms.” Masri says the academy’s next step is distribution deals that put the films in front of educational, cultural and human-rights audiences abroad — the kind of agreement that turns a festival slot into recurring income rather than a one-time premiere. It is the same gap that keeps Gaza and the West Bank’s own art and film scenes meeting mostly on a screen rather than in person, as another recent account of Palestinian cultural work under the war describes.
None of that depends on the festival calendar. A premiere in Venice generates headlines for a week; a production pipeline needs electricity, bandwidth and cash that arrive on a schedule a siege does not keep. The academy now has a name, a founding class of 25, five finished films and an unaccredited degree plan. What it does not yet have, three years into Israel’s war on Gaza, is a second graduating class, a functioning university building to grant the degree, or a funding source independent of the next international festival’s attention. Those are the numbers to check when the third edition opens.