Ghorbankarimi, Maryam and Friedman, Yael (2025) Cinema as Solidarity : The Role of UK Palestine Film Festivals in a Time of Conflict. In: HoMER 2025 Conference: Cinema and Conflict, 2025-07-08 - 2025-07-11, Galatasaray University.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This paper explores the role played by the recent iterations of three Palestine Film Festivals in the UK – London Palestine Film Festival, Bristol Palestine Film Festival and Leeds Palestinian Film Festival - in mediating the unfolding and devastating realities of the war in Israel/Palestine during the past fifteen months, and in navigating the volatile debate over it within the British public sphere. These niche festivals, dedicated to showcasing films from and about Palestine, have been running annually for many years but have experienced an unprecedented surge in attendance and media exposure since October 2023. This surge, alongside shifts in audience demographics, underscores the potential of cinema and festival events to serve as critical sites of exchange, dialogue, healing, understanding, and solidarity during moments of intense conflict. Based on participatory observation, interviews with the festival producers and study of audience responses, the paper examines the ways in which notions of activism and solidarity were understood and interpreted by the festivals’ producers and audiences. It considers how these interpretations shaped curatorial practices and audience engagement with the films. It further explores the transformative potential of the festival event, and the role ‘affective relations’ play in enabling this (Duffy, 2014).We discuss how embodied experiences of viewing and discussing Palestinian films, at a specific historical moment of crisis, affected festival attendees, and examine how the festival space with its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion provided an outlet to process feelings, to affirm identity positions and senses of belonging.