2025 Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam. Virtual Remains
Description:
Marking the 10-year anniversary of the Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam, the 2025 edition Virtual Remains takes Gaza as its central focus. In the words of contemporary poet Huda Fakhreddine:
Gaza is a locus and ethos; it is a signpost in place that has also become a source point of time. And as readers of Arabic poetry know well, a place can have agency. It can become all of time, past, present, and future. Gaza is our eternal talal, our oracle-ruins. [...] It will retell all history before and direct all history after it.
As a signpost in place and a source point of time, Gaza is a turning point globally, and it is also a marker of the long-felt conditions of virtuality that have in part defined Palestinian experience since the 1948 Al Nakba [the catastrophe] when the mass displacement, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israeli state began.With the abundance of dystopian and apocalyptic images saturating viewers’ senses for two years by the time we gather in October, Virtual Remains opens up the question: how do we as receivers of this image stream inhabit imaginaries of Gaza and of Palestine, and how do they, as locus and ethos, inhabit us? Starting here, the 2025 festival is a reflection on virtuality in all its dimensions: as representation, imagination, index, projection, embodiment, and the truth claims attached to (moving) images.
For its opening night, the festival is pleased to once again partner with Studio/K, this year for the Netherlands premiere of A State of Passion (2024), the newest documentary by seasoned filmmakers and PFFA veterans Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi, which follows British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah in the weeks after his 43 horrific days working round the clock under constant bombardment in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals.
Programme:
SK1
18:30–18:45 hour –> Doors open for the Palestinian Film Festival
18:45–19:00 hour –> Speech by Nihal, the festival director
19:00–20:30 hour –>Screening of A State of Passion, followed by a discussion until 9:00 p.m.
SK2
21:30–23:00 hour –> Screening of Stichting Palestine
Take a look at the Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam website as well.
Make sure you have purchased your tickets for the film(s) in advance on our website.