Jurors Statement for the Palestine Showcase at Sheffield DocFest 2024
“The genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, ongoing for over 76 years, has always paid special attention to destroying and stealing Palestinian culture. What better way to deny the existence of a people than to eradicate their stories, loot their family albums, and burn their libraries? But the Palestinian narrative is stronger than that. It is immortally woven into its clothes, sung in its songs, passed down through generations in its folktales, and crafted into cinema. The films selected by the Palestine Film Institute to participate in this year's Sheffield DocFest represent the enduring memories and potential futures of Palestine through its struggles, its losses, and its unassailable joy. Serene Husni's Jenin & the Nakba Between Us is a poetic-realist depiction of exile, and the impossibility of filming absence. Salim Abu Jabal's Yusra curiously and tenderly excavates the lost history of a Palestinian archeological assistant. Mohammed Al-Majdalawi, with Out of Place, puts pieces of his own past together, combing through footage he filmed while still living in Gaza and searching for the long-lost friends, and the life he finds on screen. Carol Mansour's Ghassan Abu-Sittah: The Reluctant Hero, creates a complex portrait of the British-Palestinian surgeon who went to Gaza in October 2023 to offer medical support and has come to represent the struggles of Gaza's people on a world stage.
This programme, like all PFI delegations in festivals around the world, are not only weapons of cinematic resistance, but statements of refusal against contemporary political attempts to censor Palestinian voices. The PFI jury was deeply moved and inspired by the honesty, dedication, and creativity of the selected filmmakers, and we will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in Sheffield DocFest with love in our hearts and smiles on our tear-stained cheeks”
Our Jury
Yasmin Fedda
is an award-winning Palestinian filmmaker, artist, curator and scholar whose work has been shown on the BBC and Al Jazeera English and screened at numerous festivals including Sundance, Edinburgh FF and CPH:DOX. Titles include How We Work (2024); Ayouni (2020); Queens of Syria (2014), and Breadmakers (2007). Her first interactive work is The Pathogen of War (2024).
Yasmin has taught different aspects of film in various settings around the world including with universities, NGOs, and media and civil society organisations. She is a lecturer in Film Practice at Queen Mary University, London and a Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Science.
Reem Shadid
is a curator, researcher and cultural organiser who works on the emancipatory possibilities within artistic practice, exploring the ways it intersects with ecological, political and socio-economic forms. Currently, she is the Director of Beirut Art Center in Lebanon and is a contributing editor with Infrasonica, a digital platform of non-western cultures for experimental sound and visual art practices. She is also the producer and host of Radio Alhara’s show Listening with Reem Shadid; listening sessions with artists and practitioners working at the intersection of sonic, visual and literary productions. Most recently she co-curated the 2023 edition of Taipei Biennial, Small World (2023-2024), and the second edition of New Visions (2023), the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter triennial for photography and New Media. She also directed Berlin Biennale (2022) Curator’s workshop, and was the producer and host of Aridity Lines, a podcast on local ecological knowledges and climate change in the south-eastern Mediterranean region commissioned by TBA21 Academy. Previously she was the Deputy Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, where she served in various capacities between 2006 – 2020.
Marion Schmidt
is a consultant, cultural manager and facilitator in the documentary and NGO sectors. She believes in the need for structural change and her practice seeks to create spaces where critical interaction is possible. She is co-founder, board member and senior advisor of the Documentary Association of Europe, advisor to the DW Akademie Film Department and regularly works as a consultant and mentor with transnational organisations and initiatives in different regions. She is a board member of NAAS - Network of Arab Alternative Screens e.V. and a member of the European Film Academy. She is a founding member and former director of ARTEF - Anti Racism Taskforce for European Film.
Marion is co-founder of DOX BOX e.V. and has in the last 15+ years organised public multidisciplinary arts events and conferences and worked with social enterprises and non-profit organisations in the UK, Egypt and Germany. She holds a Master's degree in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from the University of London, UK, and a Diploma in Events Management.