Since its founding in 2008, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) has evolved into a mecca for Palestinian cinema and cultural criticism, and a vital space for resilience, resistance and solidarity through art.
It’s also become an incubator for emerging and experimental Palestinian-Canadian filmmakers. Established in 2020, the TPFF Film Residency program has supported the development of 19 short films and video art works. Resident artists receive funding, bespoke workshops and mentorship to fit their individual needs. They also get to screen their films at the annual festival.
Short film is an exacting form, one that requires focus, visual clarity, and narrative efficiency. But the TPFF program values innovation, too.
“These short films archive and amplify local Palestinian voices — we are asking where imagination can go with openness to hybrid genres and experimentation,” says residency coordinator Youssef Mutawe.
This year’s resident artists will screen their works live on Oct. 1 at 6 p.m. as part of the Homegrown Shorts program, co-presented by Reelworld Film Festival and Inside Out. They will be available to stream online until Oct. 9.
The Grind was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at this year’s shorts, which we discuss below.
The 19th annual TPFF, which runs through Oct. 4, brings other shorts as well as international feature films, including Palestine 36, and Edward Said: Between Worlds, to Toronto. This year’s festival also features book launches for authors Assal Rad and Nyla Matuk, plus an immersive experience with Arab musicians NARCY and Excentrik.
Transerrante
Transerrante, a documentary by Sam Mualim Alcalde and Francisca Rojas, is a poetic meditation on how intersections of identity construct and complicate our notions of home. “I am a trans person displaced from home,” Alcalde states poignantly, before tracing a lineage of exile and resistance through their ancestors: Antonio Mualim, their paternal great-grandfather, who founded the Quillota Club Palestina for fellow exiles in Chile; and their maternal grandfather Alfonso Alcada, an activist, poet, translator and playwright, whose exile is documented in the archives of the Casa Allende here in Toronto.
The story emerges through fragments of conversations as the camera lingers on hands rolling warak enab (grape leaves) the Chileno way, and as it focuses on skin — Alcalde’s tattoos are also markers of lineage. Weaving together archival footage from Chile — including scenes from the 1973 coup d’état by General Augusto Pinochet, the short-lived 2019 uprising against economic inequality — and from the 2019 “No Pride in Genocide” protests in Toronto, Alcalde reminds us that on the street, lines between individual identity and global struggle intersect. For those with a lineage of displacement, righteous protest can become a kind of unsettled home.
Another Sea Behind Another Wall
This 12-minute short by Rania Lardjane and Adham Sinan, Another Sea Behind Another Wall explores a more solitary and imaginative — but no less important — mode of protest. The film tells the story of an elderly man who is a lifeguard from the Palestinian National Rescue Team. The camera lingers as he climbs a ladder on a rooftop, captivated by a love song about the “travelling, migrating” sea. When the perspective suddenly shifts in the middle of the film, we realize that sea lies beyond the apartheid wall. The dialogue here is sparse, and reveals a son grappling with his father’s vision and legacy. Only through his father’s eyes can his son see the Palestinian coast from Ras al Naqoura to Gaza. In fact, his father guards his memory. Through imagination, and his daily seated protest he resists and unsettles an unjust reality.
Transerrante and Another Sea Behind Another Wall are captivating shorts. Though different in subject and cinematic language, they both come from the gut, and vindicate a curation strategy that does not limit the kinds of Palestinian stories that can be told through film.
Together, they demonstrate the festival’s evolution from a platform for Palestinian film and culture, to an institution nurturing incisive and inclusive Palestinian artmaking.
More gems to check out at TPFF
This year’s local shorts program also includes screenings of You May Laugh at Me a Little by Yuula Benivolski, a documentary about a glassblower in Hebron who dreams forms and creates them in a centuries-old furnace. You will remember these images of glass and fire, and the bond between the maker’s art and materials; the sand from now-forbidden hills.
Also showing is Nader’s Girl by Omar Mouallem. This often very darkly funny film is a deft adaptation of a short story by author Saeed Teebi. It features a nuanced, ironic and vulnerable performance from Anas Hasan as Nader, a Palestinian international student who moves in with two chauvinistic bros who exploit him for rent money and social currency during a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests.
A look back at past shorts
Alumni of the residency program have achieved critical acclaim and wide circulation for their shorts. Annie Sakkab’s The Poem We Sang (2021) has screened at over 60 festivals around the world and won multiple awards; Kareem Al Sawalmeh and Ameer Zabaneh’s Just a Spoon (2022) travelled from Canada to Haifa and Bethlehem; Deena A. Alsaweer’s Stitches (2024) was a winner at the Bahrain Film Festival; and Razan AlSalah’s the island (2022) was expanded into a feature film, A Stone’s Throw, which is now streaming through The Criterion Collection.
In 2023, theatre artist Rimah Jabr made her debut as a filmmaker with De-Clutter, an 18-minute short that went from TPFF to the Cambridge Short Film Festival, and won awards at festivals in Edinburgh and Brussels. Jabr tells The Grind the program “was a gamechanger.
“This was [during] the pandemic, when theatre engagements were cancelled everywhere,” Jabr recalls. “[The TPFF’s] money allowed me to develop my vision digitally. The masterclasses meant I could learn as I worked, making the film alongside mentors.”
