Gaza women's film festival launches Cinema Academy amid the ruins

The second Gaza International Women's Film Festival opened on Monday in al-Bureij, in the Gaza Strip. The event also marked the official launch of the Gaza Cinema Academy.

The festival is being held at the destroyed site of al-Nakheel Hall in al-Bureij, under the slogan 'Women Creating Life from Death'. Like most buildings in Gaza, the hall was destroyed in Israel's three-year war, which the report says has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians.

Five documentaries by Palestinian women were screened at the opening. One is 'A Sack of Flour', an 11-minute film by emerging filmmaker Mona Abu Qass, which draws on her own experience to tell the story of hunger and food shortages in Gaza.

The film covers the dangers at aid distribution points, the lives lost while trying to obtain flour, and how the trauma of hunger continues to affect families even after food becomes available again.

Abu Qass said the film's idea stems from her personal experience and a true story; it documents daily life in Gaza weighed down by bombardment, destruction, siege, hunger and loss. She seeks to show reality as people experience it.

Another film, Raghda al-Buhaisi's 'Beyond Silence', explores wartime struggles for people with disabilities through a deaf artist who never learned to read, write or communicate through sign language. His studio in Rafah was destroyed and his parents and several family members were killed.

After being displaced to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, another family took him in and set up a modest studio by the roadside. His paintings reflect loss and displacement.

Al-Buhaisi said she wants to highlight the additional challenges people with disabilities face during war, including displacement, family loss and the destruction of livelihoods. Art, she said, can cross barriers of language and silence, turning individual pain into a visual message conveying Gaza's suffering.

The other three films are 'Soso: The Lifeline', 'Remnants of Light' and 'Dandana'. The first follows an orphaned child and his donkey who help people survive; the second a filmmaker struggling with the loss of her family and home; the third a mother whose eight children were killed and who turns to Palestinian songs with her surviving family to cope with grief.

All five documentaries were produced through a filmmaking diploma programme that began in March and brought together 25 young Palestinian women.

Festival director Ezzedine Shallah said the films draw on experiences women and girls lived through during the war, offering visual testimony to daily life and giving women space to tell their stories in their own voices. They turn individual pain into broader human stories, revealing war's psychological and social scars, he said.

The festival, which runs until October 31, features 73 films from 24 countries.

But filmmaking in Gaza faces formidable challenges: destruction of cultural institutions, scarce equipment, limited funding, power and internet outages, and the pressures of war and displacement. Women filmmakers also struggle to access training, production opportunities and international festivals.

Festival co-founder Rima Mahmoud said war and the Israeli siege on Gaza, which predates 2023, have hindered young women's filmmaking, pushing some to use simple methods and self-fund projects. Despite limited resources, she said, these films deserve international exposure.

Lebanon-based Palestinian filmmaker and another co-founder, Mai Masri, said the films help young women tell their own stories, resist erasure and preserve collective memory. The academy has developed a filmmaking diploma with al-Quds Open University, accredited by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, and is seeking agreements with distributors to take directors to international festivals.