The inaugural Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema will open on Sunday, 26 October 2025, with Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, and run through 31 October. While the festival is Gaza City–based, public screenings are planned as open-air events in Deir el-Balah, reflecting a cultural act of endurance amid hunger, death, and the violent realities of occupation.
The first edition gathers nearly 80 films from 28 countries, spanning fiction, documentary and shorts centred on women’s lives and struggles. The opening title, screening in the Arab world for the first time, follows the widely reported case of six-year-old #Hind Rajab# and has been a significant talking point since its Venice premiere. The start date was chosen to coincide with Palestinian Women’s Day, echoing the 1929 Palestinian Women’s Conference in Jerusalem.
The honorary president is Monica Maurer, a filmmaker and Palestinian visual-memory scholar. Two juries will award prizes: the fiction jury is chaired by Céline Sciamma, joined by Mohamed El Younsi, Jasmine Trinca, Fajr Yacoub and Moni Boualam; the documentary jury is led by Annemarie Jacir (director of Palestine 36), with Bassim Al Thawadi, Graziella Bildesheim, Abdulaziz Al-Sayegh and Maricet Sancristobal.
A parallel training program targets 20 young women in Gaza, combining local and remote mentorship to produce five short films to screen at the festival. In public statements at Venice and subsequent briefings, organisers described plans for generator-powered, open-air screenings «among the tents and rubble» in Deir el-Bala.
The festival describes its mission as:
Palestine is experiencing the most challenging period in its history, amid the genocidal war in the #Gaza Strip# that has now extended to the #West Bank#. Entire families have been erased from civil registries, women and children have been targeted, and each victim has their own story. Some women have lost their breadwinners, while others have lost their children and must now face life alone. Therefore, we recognized the importance of establishing a festival called the Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema to highlight the cinematic stories of women’s experiences.
