One of the programmes of the 31st edition of WMWIFF, “Notes on a Free Palestine,” includes a short film, Sard, which is a co-selection with the Palestinian women’s film organization “Shashat Woman Cinema.”

Since its founding in 2005, Shashat Woman Cinema, an independent, formally registered non-governmental organization promoting Palestinian women’s cinema, has focused on using film media to impact the social, economic and human rights realities of Palestinian women residing in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Shashat enables young Palestinian women filmmakers to become producers of a gendered, modern, and creative Palestinian culture.  

The programs and activities of Shashat have generated women filmmakers in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem who have produced 120 short fictional films, documentaries, and experimental films. Twenty-five TV programs featuring community discussions of some of these films were broadcast on Palestinian satellite stations. Since 2005, Shashat’s program of screening and discussion of its films has attracted over 200,000 participants in 265 locations conducted in collaboration with over 450 cultural and community organizations, universities, colleges, Bedouin communities, and schools in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Shashat’s training and production program launched in 2007 was extended to the Gaza Strip in 2011, a satellite office was opened in Gaza in 2012, and Shashat Woman Film Festival has opened simultaneously in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since its seventh edition in 2011, until its eleventh in 2019.  

(photo credit: Shashat Woman Cinema Official Website)

Below is the official statement by Shashat Woman Cinema in May, 2024:

❝

The horror of the 2023-24 war in Gaza has directly impacted our team with the loss of one woman filmmaker, a crew member, the child of another crew member and the wounding of another.  This in addition to the loss of many family members of our film community of approximately 25 women filmmakers, their crew and families, most of whom have been working with Shashat since 2011. Shashat has received visual documentation of the destruction of our office premises and our production and post-production equipment, in addition to our office equipment, our archive and documents- all have all been destroyed, a significant financial loss to our NGO. Some of the members of our Board and General Assembly are from Gaza and\or have family in Gaza, and are undergoing our collective heartache.

Each one of our 25 person community supports at least 50 family members, a total of at least 750 individuals. Our landlord lost his home and forty-three members of his family. Many of these families were displaced from their homes and communities during the Nakba in 1948, and are experiencing a second or fifth round of displacement, fleeing from one bombing after another, from one area after another. Survivors must take care of the wounded in the face of the lack of clean water, electricity, food, stable housing, medicine, access to proper sanitation, and the complete or partial destruction of their homes, with no personal savings or other resources to fall back on. Those now pushed by threats of bombing from their tents in the Rafah area are flocking with hundreds of thousands trying to find tents in overcrowded areas supposed to be safe, having lived through the harsh, winter elements and now the scorching heat of summer. Contact is random and sporadic with communication cuts. We have lost complete contact with many, especially in the north of Gaza.

Our women filmmakers and crews are the first generation growing up in the Blockade during the past 18 years of Gaza’s traumatic and violent history. Their films hold the memory of who they were before, of when their passion and energy opened a world beyond blockaded horizons and electrified borders, when what mattered were their dreams. Their short, young, fresh films are their voice and witness to when they believed that culture was an affirmation of human rights and dignity, and when we believed that art is transformative. Now, they await death by any means. A short night message from one of our young filmmakers reads: “my mother is wounded, my sister is wounded, our house is bombed, we have no water and no food. I can hear the army close-by. We don’t want to die without anyone hearing our voice.”  

In the West Bank, our work which is concentrated in the refugee camps of Nablus, Tulkarem and Jenin is currently frozen, on hold, due to the nearly daily and nightly Israeli attacks, killings and destructions of these camps. 

❞

WMWIFF supports “Shashat Woman Cinema” and stands in solidarity with Palestine’s struggle for freedom, condemning the illegal occupation and long-term oppression of Israeli colonization, as well as the ongoing massacre in the Gaza Strip. #FreePalestine 

Shashat Woman Cinema calls for your help, you can contribute to Shashat via their fiscal sponsor:

https://www.wmm.com/sponsored-organizations/shashat-woman-cinema/