The third edition of the Palestinian Independent Film Festival is curated around a central question: how is life sustained, transmitted, and insisted upon under conditions designed to exhaust it?This question shapes our selection of films, our approach to collective viewing, and our understanding of cinema as a cultural and political practice.

The working title of this edition draws from “We Teach Life, Sir”, a poem by Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, written in the context of ongoing colonial violence and the international demand that Palestinians continuously explain, justify, or translate their suffering. In the poem, teaching life is not presented as an abstract moral stance or a declaration of hope. It is articulated as a condition imposed on Palestinians: to maintain humanity, care, and ethical clarity while living under systematic dispossession and global indifference. The phrase points to an unequal demand placed on the oppressed; to educate the world about life while their own lives are rendered precarious.

This edition does not treat the phrase as a poetic metaphor, but as a framework for examining how Palestinian cinema engages with life as a social, cultural, and political process. The films presented here do not ask whether Palestinians survive, but how life is organised, remembered, and passed on under prolonged violence. They address questions of family, time, intimacy, labour, memory, humor, and responsibility, elements that are often erased by dominant representations that reduce Palestine to crisis and emergency.

At a moment when the political reality in Palestine is defined by genocide in Gaza, accelerated displacement, mass incarceration, and the systematic targeting of civilian life, cultural production is increasingly expected to function as testimony alone. While documentation remains essential, PIFF positions cinema as something more than evidence. Film operates here as a space where life is structured, contested, and thought through -  where relationships, contradictions, and ethical tensions are allowed complexity rather than simplification.

The relevance of this framework extends beyond Palestine. Globally, we are witnessing the normalisation of mass death, border regimes that classify populations as expendable, and political systems that rely on distancing audiences from the consequences of state violence. In this context, Palestinian cinema speaks from within an extreme manifestation of these processes, while also illuminating their broader logic. The question of whose lives are protected, narrated, or abandoned is no longer geographically confined.

PIFF’s curatorial practice is grounded in decentralised screening spaces, collective discussion, and independent circulation. We understand film festivals not as neutral platforms, but as political infrastructures that shape how images move and how meanings are produced. To watch films together, in specific local contexts, is part of resisting the isolation and fragmentation imposed by contemporary media economies and political narratives.

The films in this edition are organised across three days to reflect different dimensions of life under pressure: everyday endurance and historical repetition; intimacy and love as social practice; and intergenerational responsibility as an ethical and political question. Together, they propose cinema as a site where life is neither romanticised nor reduced to survival, but examined as something continuously negotiated and carried forward.

This edition insists on Palestinian life as lived reality, cultural presence, and political claim. It does so without appealing for recognition or empathy as an end in itself, but by asserting cinema as a form of engagement with the structures that govern whose lives are allowed to matter, and under what conditions.

PIFF Curatorial and Programming Team

2026