As the lights dimmed on the closing night of the 46th Cairo International Film Festival (12–21 November), one image captured the spirit of the year more than any red carpet tableau: producer Safi El-Din Mahmoud and director Mai Saad clutching the Youssef Sherif Rizkallah Audience Award, holding up a tablet so that a third face could join them from behind a shattered border. On the other side of the screen was co-director Ahmed Al Danaf, still trapped inside Gaza, sharing the amazing moment through a fragile, flickering connection.
Their film, One More Show, competing in the International Competition, was not the only Palestinian presence in Cairo this year. Palestine was not just represented. It was threaded through the festival’s competitions, special programmes, industry platform, and even its new XR exhibition, with Gaza sitting at its heart. Above all, the festival chose to honour one of Palestine’s most recognisable artistic voices. Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass received the Golden Pyramid Award for Lifetime Achievement, a decision that framed the round from the outse.
The International Competition included two films from and about Gaza. The first was One More Show, a documentary co-directed by Egyptian filmmaker Mai Saad and Gazan cinematographer and director Ahmed Al Danaf, produced by Red Star. Set amid ruination, the film follows the backstage lives of the Free Gaza circus troupe, a group of performers who stubbornly insist on “one more show” in the face of devastation. Their acrobatics and clowning become an act of resistance. For the Cairo audience, the film’s win felt both emotional and logical. It received the Youssef Sherif Rizkallah Audience Award, with $15,000 offered by Cred.
For both directors, the film marks a significant step. Saad, an Egyptian filmmaker and producer who began her career as an assistant director on features and shorts, makes her documentary directorial debut with One More Show. For Al Danaf, a cinematographer and filmmaker from Gaza, the film follows his earlier work on School Day, one of the short fiction films in the Ground Zero project, which received the Youssef Chahine Award at Cairo in 2024. Here, too, One More Show marks his first feature-length documentary as a director.
If One More Show captures resilience in motion, the second Gazan feature in the International Competition, Once Upon a Time in Gaza, examines the city’s internal splits and shifting sides. Directed by twin brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser, Gazan filmmakers now based in France, the film is set in Gaza in 2007. It follows Yahya, a student who befriends Osama, a charismatic drug dealer. Together they sell drugs through a falafel shop while clashing with a corrupt, arrogant cop whose unchecked power exposes a web of strained relationships and simmering tensions. This is not a film about the spectacle of bombardment, but about the slow corrosion of daily life under layered systems of control.
Cairo recognised the film decisively. Once Upon a Time in Gaza received the Best Arab Feature Film Award (a $10,000 prize offered by Watch It), as well as the Best Actor Award for Majd Eid. In addition, the Nasser brothers were awarded the Silver Pyramid for Best Director (worth $5,000). For Arab and Tarzan Nasser, this is another milestone in a career already woven deeply into contemporary festival cinema. Born in Gaza in 1988, they first came to international attention with their Cannes-selected short Condom before making their debut feature Dégradé, which premiered at the 68th Cannes Critics’ Week. Their second feature, Gaza Mon Amour, premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section and was selected as Palestine’s submission to the 93rd Academy Awards.
Beyond the main competition, Palestinian cinema continued to appear across the festival’s other sections. In the International Critics’ Week Competition, Alex Bakri’s Habibi Hussein follows Hussein Darby, the last projectionist of Cinema Jenin in Palestine, who believes that the arrival of a German NGO to restore the theatre might finally allow him to reclaim his old job. To revive the 50-year-old projector, he travels across the West Bank determined to prove his skills.
Cairo honoured the film with the Shadi Abdel Salam Award for Best Film in the Critics’ Week Competition. For Bakri, a Palestinian filmmaker active in cinematography, editing, and acting, the film is a significant step as his first feature-length documentary as a director. Over the past decade, he has edited numerous feature documentaries, including the Academy Award-nominated Of Fathers and Sons (2017), working as a cinematographer on several shorts. As an actor, he appeared in Eran Kolirin’s Let It Be Morning (2021) and Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains (2009).
In the Special Screenings section, Swiss director Nicolas Wadimoff presented Who Is Still Alive, a documentary that brings together nine voices from Gaza – nine people who recount their lives before and during the war, standing within neighbourhoods they redraw in chalk on the ground. By recreating their own Jabaliya, Nuseirat or Khan Younis, each character reclaims a tiny, fragile space for humanity, mapping dreams, dangers, and small comforts in a life relentlessly oppressed but not yet reduced to ashes. By telling their stories, they attempt to reconnect with themselves, to resist becoming ghosts, to insist: we are still here.
Wadimoff’s relationship with Palestine is long-standing. After directing his first film, he founded Akka Films in 2003 to support Palestinian filmmakers. Aisheen, shot in Gaza, premiered at the Berlinale; Operation Libertad screened in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight; Spartans won the Soleure Prize; The Apology of Gaza opened Locarno’s Critics’ Week. Who Is Still Alive, which premiered at Venice 2025, extends that body of work — a sustained, committed attempt to build an archive of lives that power structures keep trying to erase.
In the International Panorama, another Palestinian road unfolded. Palestinian on the Road by Ismail Habbash has a simple premise: a Palestinian director who has long been denied the freedom to travel finally sets out on a journey tracing the path Christ walked two thousand years ago, from Nazareth to Jerusalem. He expects to collect stories of miracles and legends. Instead, he finds the route crowded with refugee camps. Along the way, he meets people whose lives have been shaped, distorted, or suspended by the ongoing consequences of the Nakba. Their stories, dreams, and daily improvisations turn the film into a layered journey where history and the present coexist, where the spontaneous rubs against the carefully constructed, and the spiritual path becomes inseparable from the political one.
Habbash, an independent Palestinian director and screenwriter, has written and directed numerous short and feature-length documentaries, some of which have won awards at Arab and international festivals. However, the most visible and anticipated Gaza-related work at Cairo this year came from outside Palestine’s borders but firmly in its defence. The festival chose Kaouther Ben Hania’s latest film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, as its closing film. The film reconstructs the final, widely broadcast phone call of six-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped in a car under Israeli fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue while the Red Crescent volunteers on the other end of the line try desperately to reach her.
The choice resonated strongly with audiences. Demand was so intense that the festival had to schedule a second public screening of the film the day after the closing ceremony, “in response to audience requests”. Known for blurring the lines between fiction and documentary, Ben Hania has already brought two films to the Academy Awards: Four Daughters, nominated for Best Documentary in 2024 after a celebrated run at Cannes, and The Man Who Sold His Skin, nominated for Best International Feature Film in 2021.
Even beyond the cinema halls, Gaza’s presence extended into the festival’s newest frontier. The Cairo XR Exhibition, a still-young program dedicated to immersive and extended reality works, included an animated piece about Gaza titled Rebuilding Gaza by Karim Moussa. Framed around “the global willingness to support the reconstruction of Gaza”, the work proposes “a new iteration of the Landscapes of Peace”, using virtual tools to ask what rebuilding might look like – and for whom. If the films on the big screen grappled with destruction, this XR work tentatively sketched the possibility of another horizon.
At the Cairo Film Connection, the festival’s co-production platform, Palestine was a source of future cinematic worlds still in the making. In the development stage, Alicante, a project by Algerian-French-Palestinian director Lina Soualem, explored exile from a Mediterranean angle. The film follows Assia, a 33-year-old Algerian-French woman in the midst of an existential crisis, who joins her parents and unmarried aunt for the summer in Spain, where they have opened a beach restaurant near Alicante. The landscape evokes Algeria, their homeland, facing them across the sea.
The film explores questions of belonging, uprooting, and the soft violence of exile in a way that echoes the displacement stories running through Soualem’s work. Her second feature-length documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias, premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, winning multiple awards, becoming Palestine’s official submission to the 96th Academy Awards, and earning nominations at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, European Film Awards, and the Césars. At Cairo, Alicante received a Special Mention from Pathé (“Pathé Touch”), affirming its promise.
Another development project, Ping-Pong by Saleh Saadi, stayed closer to the current moment. Set in the 1948 territories, the film unfolds as the war in Gaza rages a few kilometres away. Issam, returning to his parents’ home for the first time since his brother’s death a year earlier, finds the house heavy with memories and unspoken grief. Warplanes echo overhead; funerals and news alerts form the background noise of daily life. The project received multiple in-kind awards in sound and post-production services from I Sound and Cinetech, as well as a $1,500 cash award from Special Touch — support that will help move it closer to completion.
In the post-production stage, Asphalt by Hamza Hamideh follows Debs, a 20-year-old Palestinian refugee born in Baqa’a, Jordan’s largest refugee camp, home to over 120,000 Palestinians displaced by the 1967 war. With limited educational options, Debs works as a shepherd, saving to marry the girl he loves, from the same camp, but his plans are repeatedly postponed by family deaths, each bringing a 40-day mourning period. In October 2023, as his wedding is finally scheduled, the Israeli–Palestinian war erupts once again. The conflict both deepens grief and rekindles a sense of collective hope among refugees, drawing global attention back to Gaza and Palestine. As funerals multiply in the camp, the wedding is delayed again and again. Debs, alongside his grandfather and brothers, searches for a way forward... The project received the Rough Cut Lab Africa (RCLA) and Nu’Ta award.
The top distinction in the post-production category went to Revolutionaries Never Die by Mohanad Yaqubi, which received Best Project in Post-Production, alongside a mentorship award from Rough Cut Lab Africa (RCLA). The film is built around the legacy of Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, who between 1973 and 1983 created 16 films about struggles and revolutions across the Arab world. In the early 1990s, as Lebanon’s conflicts officially ended, Saab meticulously preserved her works. Revolutionaries Never Die reconstructs Saab’s presence through fragments of footage, tracing her evolving thoughts, her persistence, her battles with financial precarity and the Western gaze.
Yaqubi, co-founder of Idioms Film in Ramallah and member of the collective Subversive Film, has long worked at the intersection of archival practice and militant cinema. His debut feature, Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory, premiered at Toronto before screening at the Berlinale, Cinéma du Réel, Dubai, and Carthage.
In the conversations and masterclasses of Cairo Industry Days, the Palestinian presence was again unmistakable. One session, In Conversation with Adam Bakri: Between Identity and Performance, traced the actor’s journey from a childhood steeped in art to an international career that has made him one of the most visible Arab performers on the global stage. Known for his nuanced, quietly intense work, Bakri gained international recognition for his role in the Oscar-nominated Omar (2013), where his portrayal of a young Palestinian freedom fighter drew wide critical praise. In Cairo, the conversation explored his approach to character, his relationship to Palestinian identity, and his belief in cinema’s power to connect human experiences across borders. For festival-goers, the session offered a living bridge between the films on screen and the faces that carry them.
Another highlight was In Conversation with Hiam Abbass: A Borderless Journey Through Acting and Filmmaking, honouring the recipient of this year’s Golden Pyramid Honorary Award for a Lifetime Achievement. Known for her roles in The Syrian Bride, Gaza Mon Amour, The Visitor, and the award-winning series Succession, Abbass has built a career that moves seamlessly between Arab and international cinema, always anchored in emotional truth and quiet intensity. In addition to her acting, she has directed several films, including Inheritance, and has devoted much of her career to amplifying Palestinian stories. Cinema cannot halt a war but, as Cairo’s 46th round quietly insisted, it can refuse erasure.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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