Falastin Film Festival returns for 2025
Falastin Film Festival, the new and urgent Palestinian film festival in Scotland, returns for its second edition with an expanded programme. We look at how the event goes beyond passive film watching to foster a space of learning, solidarity and action
When we engage with cinema on a level above consumption, we engage with cinema as reality. Such is the main aim of the Falastin Film Festival, the annual event of Palestinian cinema, arts and culture, which returns to Edinburgh in May and expands to Glasgow for the first time. Ahead of the festival's second edition and in conversation with its co-founders, Nastassia Isawi and Gabrielle Kacha, I find a small creative team who are proving unstoppable when artistic urgency is required.
Kacha and Isawi explain that Falastin Film Festival seeks to “equip audiences with the historical context that has led up to this point…” and “to better understand so that we can better act.” If you’re not already aware, Israel has relentlessly broken ceasefire agreements and escalated the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, having killed 92 Palestinians over the Easter weekend alone; on the land where Christ was born, there was no Good Friday to be felt.
The airstrikes continue, and the targeted killing of Palestinian journalists, doctors, academics, fathers, mothers and infants persists in unspeakably horrific ways. But, we must speak. We must witness atrocity and demand the incarceration of the blood-soaked hands responsible and the dismantling of Western-supplied arms that enable it. Kacha and Isawi tell me that Falastin Film Festival wants to “foster a space for learning and unlearning”, through an updated curation of events spanning films, art, music, and even workshops for children this year.
A highlight of the lineup is the panel discussion between two esteemed Palestinian figures: Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta and Yara Eid. Sitta worked as a surgeon on the medical frontlines in Gaza for 43 consecutive days and has been the Rector of Glasgow University since April last year. Eid is a Palestinian journalist, a human rights advocate from Gaza and an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh. The panel will be moderated by Hazem Jamjoum, a Palestinian educator and an editor with publishing house Maqam Editions. On Falastin's website, it states that the 'conversation will provide an essential platform for those who have borne witness to the relentless violence and systemic destruction inflicted upon Gaza'. In my view, the prospective discussion promises what is a critical part of our position as individuals in the West who must accept our complicity in genocide: the tool of accurate knowledge.
The Falastin team states their commitment to shaping their purpose beyond education and community, hoping the festival “inspires and generates [action]” to transcend the “passive experience” of film-watching. This involves effectively engaging the audience through dialogue, which sets precedent for major discourse across communities, integral to social mobility and morale.
This year, the festival will showcase films from Palestine, South Lebanon, and the Palestinian diaspora, with a consistent focus on Gaza. Kacha also explains that topics range from “diaspora’s inability to return to Palestine to the use of the manipulation of sound as a form of torture.”
What does it mean to centralise Gaza? You may have heard this notion before, but what does it truly mean to use art and cinema to focalise a city, society, and people under threat of total annihilation? This is where you come in. Team Falastin invites audiences to a series of screenings with a chance for discussion after each film. The festival holds a critical position here in expanding and utilising the communal openness that the people of Edinburgh and Glasgow have demonstrated since Israel’s war on Gaza began over 18 months ago.
When colonisation is being violently carried out as we speak, what should our response be as outsiders and how do we communicate the exact narrative and retell the genuine stories in alignment with what confronts Palestinians on the ground? Falastin Film Festival, with an array of promising screenings and events, holds the answer to that, and I encourage you to find out. Whether you're interested in film, music, or simply want to hear an invaluable discussion between two distinguished Palestinian figures, Falastin Film Festival promises to deliver.
Falastin Film Festival takes place 9-10 May at CCA, Glasgow, and 15-19 May at Scottish Storytelling Centre and Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh
Full programme at falastinfilmfest.com