Existence as Resistance, the latest fundraising event from the UK-based grassroots organisation Films of Resistance that works to champion and offer financial support to the Palestinian film industry, is taking place in London at Palestine House on February 22.
Films screening include Mahdi Fleifel’s Berlinale 2015 short 20 Handshakes For Peace; Kamal Aljafari’s documentary and experimental feature A Fidai Film, which won the Visions du Réel jury prize and played at BFI London Film Festival last year; and Mona Benyamin’s Trouble In Paradise.
Approximately 50% of donations go to supporting cultural and grassroots organisations in Palestine, 40% for production support for Palestinian filmmakers in the region and 10% to cover screening fees at the events.
“We want to help young filmmakers in their production or post-production process,” said Films of Resistance co-founder Abla Kandalaft, a programmer at London’s Garden Cinema.
“They write to us, we send their script to a committee, and decide how best to help each person – it could be by giving them money, or mentorship.”
Sold-out screenings
Kandalaft, who is of Lebanese-Syrian origin, helped to create Films of Resistance in 2024 when she was contacted by London and Madrid-based programmer Bruno Atkinson, who wanted to do something to help Palestinian filmmakers in the face of the escalating Israel-Gaza conflict.
Together they arranged a sold-out screening as a fundraiser at London’s 500-seater Genesis Cinema in June, featuring short films from Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, Mohammed Almughanni, Waseem Kheir, Ibrahim Handal and Dina Naser.
Kandalaft said the vision was to show films from Palestine that “were dramas, that showed people living their lives, and humanised” as opposed to just documentary, as had been the focus of several other fundraisers.
The team of volunteers, which also includes London-based programmer Claire Nicolas, considered donating the proceeds to healthcare charity Medical Aid For Palestinians, before deciding to send the money to the Jenin Creative Cultural Centre, with the director of the centre using the support to put on film workships.
“Jenin is in the West Bank. It’s locked off. You don’t have access to many things,” explained Kandalaft. “We were wondering whether it’s easier to buy stuff in Europe and get it shipped over. In the end, there was a little shop selling professional grade cameras, and the director used that money to buy cameras and a good internet connection, and host three film workshops.”
The group posted on the open-source Signal app, whereby anyone in the world could get in touch and request to show the films for which the group had acquired the rights. This was on the condition anyone hosting a screening would pay the filmmakers, reimburse their own screening costs, and put the remainder into Films of Resistance’s pot for supporting Palestinian filmmaking.
Screenings have run across the UK as well as in Portugal, Sweden, Los Angeles, Lithuania, Czech Republic and the Netherlands.
“Decentralisation is the big ambition for us,” added Nicolas. “We want to reach as many people as possible, people who don’t know anything about Palestinian cinema, and specifically modern Palestinian cinema. We have To A Land Unknown, or No Other Land, but there is a lot of humanity and great filmmaking in recent cinema that might not be distributed enough.”
“We might branch out into an adjacent region,” noted Kandalaft. “You could potentially have a Lebanese film, going forward, and so on. But this would be a few months down the line.”
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