Al-Bureij, Gaza Strip – A Sack of Flour, an 11-minute documentary by the emerging filmmaker Mona Abu Qass, draws on her personal experience to examine Israel’s use of starvation against Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave. The film is one of five documentaries by Palestinian women screened Monday at the opening of the second Gaza International Women’s Film Festival, which also marked the official launch of the Gaza Cinema Academy. The event took place at the site of the al-Nakheel Hall in al-Bureij, central Gaza, under the slogan “Women Creating Life from Death”.
The hall is destroyed, like the majority of buildings in Gaza, after three years of Israel’s war, which has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians. The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to find food in Gaza, the dangers at aid distribution points and the lives lost while trying to obtain flour. Through Abu Qass’s own experiences, A Sack of Flour explores how the trauma of hunger continues to affect families even after food becomes available again.
Those experiences have renewed relevance as Israeli restrictions on goods entering Gaza and cuts to food assistance have caused shortages and fears of a return to famine. His art studio in southern Gaza’s Rafah was destroyed by Israel, and his parents and several family members were killed. After being displaced to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, another family took him in and set up a modest studio by the roadside.
His paintings reflect loss and displacement, expressing what words cannot through colour and line. The films document life in Gaza and the suffering brought by war. Soso: The Lifeline follows an orphaned child and his donkey, who help people survive in Gaza.
Remnants of Light follows a filmmaker struggling with the loss of her family and home, while Dandana tells the story of a mother whose eight children were killed, and who turns to Palestinian songs with her surviving family to cope with her grief. The five documentaries were produced through a filmmaking diploma programme that began in March and brought together 25 young Palestinian women. Festival director Ezzedine Shallah said the films draw on experiences women and girls lived through during the war, offering visual testimony to daily life and giving women space to tell their stories in their own voices.
But even with events like the festival, filmmaking in Gaza comes with formidable challenges. The destruction of cultural institutions, scarce equipment, limited funding, power and internet outages, and the pressures of war and displacement have severely restricted opportunities for film production. Women filmmakers also struggle to access training, production opportunities and international festivals.
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