No Pride in Genocide : Queer Cinema for Palestine

Abgad Hawaz, Robin Riad, 1min, Canada (2024)

Audio: Arabic, English 
Subtitles: N/A 

Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Hawaz is a way for her to hold close to her language, culture, and roots. (Written by Tara Hakim for TQFF)

Robin Riad is an experimental filmmaker, film programmer, and visual artist. Robin works with analogue mediums, and enjoys exploring the materiality of film in her work. She has screened in countries such as Canada, the United States, Spain, Italy, Germany, India and more. When not making films, Robin spends her time teaching workshops, making potions in the darkroom, and volunteering at local arts organizations.

Out of Gaza, Seza Tiyara Selen, Jannis Osterburg, 9min, Germany (2025)

Audio: German, Arabic
Subtitles: English

A young Palestinian woman wants to flee from Gaza with her friends, hoping to find freedom in the West. As a talented engineer she makes escape possible, but doubts arise if it is the right decision to leave. When they cross the wall, they encounter a world they did not expect.

Seza Tiyara Selen (she/her) and Jannis Osterburg (they/them) are university students in Hildesheim, Germany, who specialise in stop-motion animation. Their collaboration since 2018 featured live action and animation alike. Currently working on a feature length stop motion animation film called “Jil Garodin’s Adventures”, the focus of their work is on revolution, social justice and socialist as well as anarchist ideas. The trans filmmakers’ projects feature themes of queerness, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism and disability rights.

Blood Like Water, Dima Hamdan, 14min, Palestine (2023)

Audio: Arabic
Subtitles: English

Shadi embarks on a secret adventure, and accidentally drags his family into a trap where they only have two choices; either collaborate with the Israeli occupation, or be shamed and humiliated by their own people. Based on true stories.

Dima Hamdan is an award-winning filmmaker based in Berlin. Her last short film, Blood Like Water (2024, Palestine), won the Best Short Narrative awards in the Brooklyn Film Festival and Through Women’s Eyes Film Festival in Florida. Currently on a festival tour, the film has been to nearly 40 festivals so far, including the Bafta-Qualifying Galway Film Festival and Melbourne Film Festival.

a tangled web drowning in honey, Tara Hakim & Hannah Hull, 9min, Canada (2023)

Audio: English
Subtitles: English

a tangled web drowning in honey is an experiential and textural short film that invites viewers into the inner workings of a mind to ponder the ways in which we love and unlove ourselves.

Tara Hakim is a multi-disciplinary process-based artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. Originally Palestinian, born and raised in Jordan with an Austrian grandmother, Tara creates public displays of vulnerability that invite the viewer to meditate on notions of self, diasporic existences, and spaces in between – both physically and mentally. Working across video, installation, performance, and, more recently, textiles and ceramics, she intertwines the complexities of cultural history and personal psychology with an experimental, playful, and tender approach. 

Hannah Hull (they/them) (UK) is an artist and musician, also known as Burning Salt. The ancient practice of ‘burning salt’ is an act of expulsion, purification or protection. Hull uses song, poetry, drawing, animation and film to these ends. They studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. After a decade of specialism in socially-engaged art, Hull is currently focused on exploring somatic practices and trauma. They are also a boat dweller, TEDx speaker, intersectional feminist, queer person and recovering addict.

Aliens in Beirut, Raghed Charabaty, 16min, Lebanon, Canada (2025)

Audio: Arabic, English
Subtitles: English

Aliens in Beirut blurs doc and fiction, exploring alienation and desire at home through scripted improv, wildlife cinematography and visual experimentation. Charabaty (who also stars in the film) reimagines events from their life leading up to the fateful 2020 Beirut Port Explosion. Returning to Beirut from Toronto, desperately in search of roots, Amir falls for a stranger by the sea. In the end, the explosion cares for nobody – leaving behind traces of unerasable desire.

Raghed Charabaty is an experienced Lebanese-Canadian director (drama, comedy) based in Toronto and Beirut. Charabaty’s films have won at the Toronto International Film Festival: Canada’s Top Ten, and his repertoire of original works have screened at over 100 film festivals worldwide.

Palcorecore, Dana Dawud, 8min, Internet footage from Palestine (2023)

Audio: Arabic and English
Subtitles: English

Dana Dawud’s Palcorecore (Palestine) is a hypnotic fusion of dance, archival footage, and internet-circulated videos that collapse past and present into a visceral portrait of Palestinian life. Opening with The Lovers Songs Band and excerpts from Jenin, Jenin (2003), the film assembles fleeting yet powerful images: flag-waving horseback riders, families at the beach, teenagers dancing in flames, and acts of resistance against occupation. Dawud’s deadpan narration—“I witness you witness me, we are martyrs together”—pulls the viewer into a shared act of witnessing. Through rhythmic disorder and movement, the film captures the resilience, rebellion, and everyday joys of Palestinian existence, focusing particularly on youth and women in their defiant assertion of life.

The film was commissioned by Onty and OnMyComputer for the CoreCore symposium which took place in New York, November 2023.

Dana Dawud is a Palestinian artist and writer exploring internet images and philosophies.

I never promised you a Jasmine Garden, Teyama AlKamli, 20min, Canada (2023)

Audio: Arabic, English
Subtitles: English

Tara, a queer Palestinian woman in her late 20s, attempts to suppress her internal emotional turbulence during a phone call with her best friend Sarab, with whom she is in love.

Teyama Alkamli is an award-winning filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. Her visually tender and deeply human work deals predominantly with issues of identity, sexuality, displacement and migration. She is an alumna of DocNomads, the European Mobile Film School, Hot Docs Emerging Filmmaker Lab, TIFF Writers’ Studio, and the Canadian Film Centre’s Director Lab.

In 2021 Teyama’s mid-length documentary, Hockey Mom, won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary Program. Her films have screened worldwide at festivals such as TIFF, Berlinale, and Doc Lisboa.

Don’t take my joy away, Omar Gabriel, 7min, Lebanon (2024)

Audio: Arabic
Subtitles: English

Set in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, two friends revel in the small joys of life until violence suddenly disrupts their world. Forced to flee, they embark on a dangerous journey of survival, confronting fear, chaos, and the stark realities around them. Along the way, they must choose between remaining in the shadows or seeking the light.

Omar Gabriel is a Lebanese filmmaker whose work explores love, societal pressure, and the courage to break free. With a raw, poetic aesthetic, he amplifies marginalized voices and tells stories of resistance and defiance.