Inside the 18th edition of Toronto's Palestine Film Festival

Putting on this year’s festival of Palestinian film in the Canadian cultural hub wasn’t easy, but the stories kept coming.

It’s a typical Wednesday afternoon on King Street West, Toronto’s bustling entertainment district. Wading through busy sidewalks and avoiding the perpetual construction feels a little like swimming upstream, all to the ambient noise of passing streetcars and the screeching tires of food couriers. Ten days earlier, the current was a lot stronger. The area around the TIFF Lightbox, home to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), had been cordoned off for its 50th edition, red carpets unfurled for Hollywood’s elite and its eager fanbase. Now the camera flashes are gone, the carpets rolled up, and it’s back to business as usual, with no crowds gathered outside the Lightbox. There’s no indication whatsoever that another festival is taking place inside: a festival of Palestinian film.

Running for the past 18 years, the entirely volunteer-run Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) stands as the third longest-running showcase of Palestinian cinema in North America. What began as an event commemorating the 1948 Nakba has grown into a city staple, and one of the few chances that Canadian audiences have to engage with Palestinian cinema. 

Stepping through the glass doors of the Lightbox on the first day of TPFF is like stepping into a parallel dimension. Folks of all ages, many with a keffiyeh draped around their shoulders wander the foyer, and there’s also the occasional “Jews Say No To Genocide” t-shirt, familiar from the city’s now heavily policed protests in solidarity with Palestine. The air is vibrating with excitement, especially at the volunteer table where first-timers collect their passes, thrilled to be part of something so meaningful. Mere steps away, a rush line is forming for the sold-out opening film and Canadian premiere of the Nasser brothers’ 2025 tragicomedy, Once Upon a Time in Gaza. The Cannes ‘Un Certain Regard’ winner for best directing is one of two comedies at TPFF this year. The other, Thank You For Banking With Us, is Laila Abbas’ sophomore feature and is also having its Canadian premiere at TPFF. It’s reportedly one of the last productions to shoot in the West Bank prior to October 7. Both films find comedy in the maddening reality of life under Israeli occupation: one through an aimless man finding purpose in a perilously low-budget propaganda series, the other through two sisters racing to secure an inheritance that would otherwise go to their estranged brother, who lives abroad. In each film, survival demands resorting to sometimes laughable means.

“We’re trying to keep everyone’s spirits up, even our own, in a phase that feels increasingly like separating from humanity,” says Dania Majid, co-founder and lead programmer of TPFF. When planning for this year’s festival began in late May, the team hoped to look ahead with a degree of positivity, to focus on rebuilding in the wake of ceasefire talks. But as Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza resumed, optimism gave way to guilt, with the team feeling that any planning in the face of such devastation was “absurd”. But submissions poured in. With 23 feature films and 91 shorts, it’s the most the festival’s ever received – a potent reminder, Majid says, of TPFF’s purpose: to tell stories about Palestine. If the stories were still coming, the festival, too, would go on.  

Day two of the festival grapples with memory, record-keeping and narrative, asking audiences to reflect on whose stories get to be told and whose remain obscured. In Familiar Phantoms, London-based Palestinian filmmaker Larissa Sansour uses her family’s photos and mementos for a visual mediation on how displacement affects memory against an unrelenting threat of erasure. “[Familiar Phantoms] is like poetry captured in a video,” says Amanda Boulos, TPFF event organizer and programmer. She notes that programming decisions were influenced by the urge to balance fact and fiction; to satisfy the need to present the raw reality of Gaza while also giving artists the chance to express themselves in alternative ways. 

At the end of the screening, tear-streaked faces are illuminated by brightening cinema lights, but despite the somber atmosphere, several people rush down to the main floor where seats were filling for the launch of Palestinian-Canadian writer Saeed Teebi’s memoir, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination. Over 600 people RSVP-ed, says Majid, prompting TPFF to hold a second event to meet the demand. At the event, Teebi touches on the constant need for Palestinians to self-censor to avoid scrutiny, whilst also trying to offer a counter-narrative to the imposed dominant depiction of Palestinians as a violent people. 

The segment Uncensored: Anti-Palestinian Racism continues these themes through a collection of short films by emerging Palestinian-Canadian filmmakers. In The Silence They Taught Us, Paula Sahyoun documents her experience of keeping her “Palestinianness private”. Meanwhile, Between the Silence and the Noise follows a student journalist who uncovers her family’s hidden history in class, her professor fumbling questions about his coverage of the Lebanese Civil War. Turning to her ailing grandfather, she learns the truth for the first time. As filmmaker Sara Balkis explains during the post-screening Q&A, the film was “heavily inspired by seeing our people in Gaza resist and try to connect their struggle to the past”. It’s a moment of consciousness for Palestinian youth, she adds, “every generation has that moment”. 

Three of the segment’s films were developed through TPFF’s annual residency programme, which is a rare opportunity for Palestinian-Canadian filmmakers. “Funding bodies are very risk averse, so if I’m touching on something that’s political, even if it’s a question on most Canadians’ minds, it’s something I’ve been told they may shy away from,” Balkis says. “But I hadn’t let that deter me from trying.” 

The need for dedicated spaces exists because Canada isn’t immune to suppressing Palestinian voices or expressions of solidarity, as evidenced by what’s been referred to as ‘the Palestine Exception’ in mainstream media coverage and arrests of protesters boycotting arts sponsors with ties to Israeli weapons manufacturers. “We got no mainstream media coverage, no one was interested,” says Majid. “Despite everything we’ve offered and everything that’s happening in real time, no one was interested in covering TPFF.” Harassment on social media, police presence, inexplicable logistical hiccups, and the occasional festival visitor looking to publicly humiliate TPFF staff, are typical experiences, the organizers say.

In an essay about planning a festival of Palestinian film at Columbia University in New York in 2003, Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir wrote that the aim was to “intervene and contribute to the rather disappointing cultural discourse on Palestine in the US” by showcasing nuanced films from the diaspora. She described a “communal urgency” in resisting the systematic destruction of Palestinian civil and cultural life.

Two decades later, the ethos and challenges Jacir recounts in her essay are reflected at TPFF, and amplified in The Encampments, which documents the Palestinian solidarity movement at Columbia University. The University of Toronto had its own encampment, one of the largest in the world and the longest held in the school’s history, says Sara Rasikh, one of the encampment organizers. She, along with many students, are in attendance for the screening. The conversation that follows is between her and other organizers – including a Columbia student who fled the US fearing persecution – and is illuminating and deeply moving, concluding with a standing ovation. 

Closing the festival, a sold-out screening of the deeply intimate and expertly shot epic All That’s Left of You from Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis tells the story of a Palestinian family from 1948 to present day. It’s a fine example of cinema accomplishing what other forms of media have failed to do: humanize the Palestinian experience. “With this film, I wanted to put a human face on the headlines,” says Dabis in an email to Little White Lies. “I wanted to explore how our specific history has shaped us, but I wanted to center a family in order to make the story universal. In many ways, this could be any family, because what family hasn’t experienced political hardship whether now or in the past?” The film was shot in Cyprus and Greece, but mostly in northern Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, after the crew was forced to pack up production in the West Bank following October 7. “We had to look for Palestine everywhere but Palestine,” Dabis says. It was by far the most challenging experience of her life, also emotionally: “We were essentially making a movie about what was happening as it was happening”. But the film was also a gift. “To have a container for all our grief and anger and love, to be able to create at a time of such destruction gave us all a deep sense of purpose and focus,” she says. 

Reflecting on having the film screened as part of TPFF, Dabis says that it means a lot to her to receive and provide support to the community. “Just as much as I made this film for those who don’t know enough about us, I also very much made it for us. To represent us. To represent a time in our history that we’ve never before seen in cinema: urban Palestine in 1948, that time before we lost it all.” 

In their closing speech, the festival organizers begin with a land acknowledgment, recognizing that the Lightbox stands on the territory of several indigenous nations, and continue with a heartfelt appreciation for festival sponsors, volunteers and supportive TIFF Lightbox staff. “We want to transform the festival and our city into a space that can nourish your soul, surrounded by people who see Palestine and justice clearly, and hold its people in their hearts,” says Boulos to the crowd. As for what’s next, more year-round events and more grant applications, the organizers say, with some granting institutions now demanding to know why TPFF insists on holding its in-person festival (it’s also available online for a limited time) at the Lightbox. “Well, why not?” asks Majid. Why not, indeed.