In an 11-minute documentary titled A Sack of Flour, emerging filmmaker Mona Abu Qass draws on her own experience of starvation to capture the perilous search for food in Gaza and the lasting psychological trauma of hunger. Another film, Beyond Silence by debut director Raghda al-Buhaisi, chronicles the wartime ordeal of a deaf artist whose studio was destroyed and whose relatives were killed, illustrating how he uses roadside painting to convey grief and displacement without spoken or sign language.
These works are among five short documentaries by Palestinian women screened at the opening of the second Gaza International Women's Film Festival. Hosted among the ruins of the al-Nakheel Hall in central Gaza's al-Bureij under the slogan "Women Creating Life from Death," the screening also marked the launch of the Gaza Cinema Academy. The featured films were produced through a diploma programme launched in March that brought together 25 young women to document daily life during a war that has lasted three years and killed more than 74,000 Palestinians.
The other films in the showcase focus on different aspects of survival amid ongoing bombardment and siege. Soso: The Lifeline follows an orphaned boy and his donkey assisting neighbors, Remnants of Light portrays a filmmaker coping with the loss of her home and family, and Dandana centers on a mother who sings traditional songs with surviving relatives after losing eight children. Festival director Ezzedine Shallah said the documentaries preserve personal testimonies that might otherwise never reach screens, transforming individual pain into broader human narratives for international audiences.
Producing cinema in the enclave poses severe challenges, from destroyed cultural spaces and scarce equipment to frequent power outages and lack of funding. Festival co-founders Rima Mahmoud and Mai Masri pointed out that women filmmakers often rely on simple, self-funded methods to overcome these barriers. According to Masri, helping young women tell their own stories allows them to develop professional skills, resist cultural erasure, and preserve collective memory despite widespread devastation.