The Ajyal Film Festival returned this year with a thought-provoking program and a special section entitled "Voices from Palestine" including long and short features and documentaries.

In the Ajyal 2024 film catalog, the head of Doha Film Institute Fatma Hassan Alremaihi explains to festival goers that the institute had made the choice to defer the festival the previous year. As the event continued this year, the centerpiece of the section was the feature-length "From Ground Zero," composed of three to six-minute fiction and documentary films. Filmgoers know that the line between the two genres has always been blurry. However, on ground zero in Gaza, it becomes meaningless, especially with the playful film techniques that Gazan directors are using.

Watching these films, one constantly asks how art and, indeed, films can be produced during a genocide. This is precisely the question that the filmmakers themselves ask and have turned this question into a film genre. Watching all these stories back-to-back, one gets a sense that a new kind of cinema is being created in Gaza. Whether fiction or documentary, the pieces talk about the conditions of how the film is being made, sometimes revealing the crew on set in the end.

This reality-fiction curtain is torn early in the series in "Sorry Cinema" when we enter the world of the narrator, who tells us he is a filmmaker, that he has taken his films to festivals around the world and that he was hoping to go collect an award at one when the war started. On the screen, we see people filming and destroyed homes, and it is unclear whether these are scenes from the narrator’s current reality or the film he was supposed to be presenting at a festival. In another called "Soft Skin," we see the attack on Gaza through animated papercut apartment blocks and figurines. Then we see children making those figurines and operating cameras and computers to make the film. In "Out of Frame," an artist tries to salvage their art from their bombed-out home. There is also plenty of black humor: in "Hill of Heaven," a young man picks up a body bag and uses it as a sleeping bag in his tent.

The other long feature in the "Voices from Palestine" section is "Janin, Jenin," in which filmmaker Mohammad Bakri revisits the characters of his documentary film ‘Jenin, Jenin’ from 2002. I spent the better half of the "Janin, Jenin" trying to determine whether I had already seen it, as the faces seemed familiar. Bakri’s 2002 film ‘Jenin, Jenin’ seems to be one of those cultural artifacts that have been passed on to collective memory: the mute man showing the camera around the camp, the young girl speaking with absolute clarity about resistance. "Janin, Jenin" gives us the afterlife of the film, how Bakri was persecuted for showing an Israeli soldier committing a war crime, and how the Israeli law chased him for 20 years for showing this crime. It is almost a hark back to a more naive time when Israeli soldiers wanted to protect their identities while they were committing crimes, while in 2024, they advertise them on social media with glee. We have indeed come a long way.

In the "Voices from Palestine" selection was also Mohammed Almughanni’s "An Orange from Jaffa," a humorous take on the everyday experience of checkpoints in Palestine. The film is about how our hero Mohammed tries to get to a second checkpoint when he fails to get through the first with his "European" residence permit. He finally manages to find a taxi to take him, but then they are stuck at this second checkpoint during Sabbath. It is amazing to me that Almugahhni, as a Palestinian, has the vastness of heart to depict Israeli soldiers as misguided figures under family and state pressure. But that Palestinians get to depict Israeli folly on screen at all feels like a little triumph on its own.

Most welcome in the section was Kamal Aljafari’s "Undr" showing archival footage of Palestine with moody music and footage where he has coloured different parts of the black and white image. Aljafari shows a series of explosions, made to look like archival footage. The central image the film returns to is the fortification of Masada, which stands at the border(!) between Israel and Jordan and is a symbol of heroic defeat in the Israeli imagination. "Undr" is a revisiting of the technique Aljafari uses in "A Fidai" (2024), another piece of film/video art that uses a larger archive, and with a genius focus on watermelons.

Annie Sakkab’s "The Poem We Sang" also engages with the archive, but this time a more personal one, as she works up to sharing the poem that her uncle sang. The film works with collage, superimpositions and archival footage of Palestinians crossing the river to Jordan. We are somewhat familiar with these images, but this time a woman strikes me, carrying her sewing machine, her livelihood, on her head into her exile.

There are many other films in the program with a Palestinian theme, but I would like to mention a film that is not in the "Voices from Palestine" section but could easily have been included. The Kenyan documentary "Searching for Amani" is about a boy whose father is killed while acting as a guide in the "nature reserve" owned by white settlers. As the boy investigates his father’s murder, we learn that the "nature reserve" is in the middle of the herders’ pasturing grounds and that the white settlers are employing rangers against the herders who try to pass into their ancestral territory. The white settler colonial method of drawing arbitrary lines and then causing violence, death and ecocide repeats itself in many parts of the world. Seeing stories from these places next to one another strengthens our understanding that the Palestinian struggle and the struggle for land rights everywhere around the world are one.