Arab Film Festival Presents: Borderless, Curated by Dina Amin
Too often, Palestinians are seen only through narrow, distorted frames. This shorts program challenges these misconceptions by presenting authentic stories from within Palestine itself.
Bringing together a powerful selection of documentary, experimental, and fiction films, this program foregrounds voices rooted in lived experience. Each work offers a unique lens on identity, resilience, and resistance, revealing the textures of everyday life and the complexity of being Palestinian today.
Filmmakers from the West Bank, Gaza and Occupied Palestine come together as a unified voice and embody what it means to be borderless: connected through shared memory, imagination, and creative resistance that cannot be confined by geography or separation.
INFO & TICKETS: https://arabfilm29.eventive.org/schedule/6907aed888c2029b6e55f71a
Program:
Wadi Al-Salib: Two Minutes
Yearly, the siren is sounded for two minutes in 1948 Occupied Palestine. “Wadi Al-Salib: Two Minutes.” is based on the sound of the siren, yet on another comparison.
Fi Alwasat
Nour tries to make a paper airplane with a child after hiding in their house during the occupation forces’ invasion of the city. The incident takes him back in time with that memory. Will Nour succeed in flying the paper plane in both timelines?
Let There Be Light
I am seeking through the video the search for the light lost in our lives. We live in a geographical area free of light, with all its meanings, details, and forms. From a permanent power outage, to discovery the lost light in our lives in Gaza. I’m always looking for that light in the streets and alleyways, my artworks reflect this eagerness and the constant need for light. I will seek to discover the light, which distinguishes this bright city.
Changes in Distance
Changes in the Distance is filmed entirely from the windows of an apartment on the sixth floor in Ras Khamis, bordering Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp. Using a zoom lens, and through prolonged observation and repeated acts of filming, the artist deconstructs the visible landscape — buildings, movements, and daily occurrences — while maintaining physical distance from the scene. The work explores how seeing from afar becomes both an act of documentation and of separation. Between the neighborhoods of Ras Khamis, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Shuafat, the lens mediates a space layered with political, social, and personal boundaries.
Untethering
This short experimental film was created during the artist’s initial transition from photography to video. She included shots from her travels and from her return to Palestine. The main inspiration was Jan Svankmajer‘s film “J.S. Bach: Fantasy in G Minor”.
Mirrors
A poetic reflection on identity, loss, and belonging, Mirrors follows a young man as he confronts his own image in the mirror. Through a quiet inner monologue, he questions his purpose, his past, and his place in a fragmented homeland. Torn between emptiness and overflow, presence and absence, the film drifts between personal memories and collective struggles. With layered visuals, raw narration, and intimate soundscapes, Still Here captures the silent resistance of simply continuing to exist, when the answers remain uncertain, and the mirror keeps asking back.
Just a Spoon
Inspired by events from Gilboa Prison in 2021 with the escape of 6 political prisoners from captivity, we follow a day in the life of a spoon as it transforms from the common kitchen utensil to the key catalyst of a prison escape that embodies the resilient spirit of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Presented through an abstracted perspective and visual storytelling style, this poetic short takes the liberatory ideals specific to the now infamous Gilboa prison escape and globalizes them onto a much more encompassing demographic: freedom defenders worldwide.
The Wall
In a refugee camp, a man in his sixties lives surrounded by walls covered in writing. Wanting to brighten things up, he decides to paint the walls of his small home. But each time he tries, external factors intervene, thwarting his efforts. Eventually, he gives up. In the refugee camp, it’s widely understood that despite being attached to individual homes, the walls belong to the collective community. People continue to write on them, using them as a form of resistance, standing together in solidarity against forces they face.
