Interview: Falastin Film Festival’s Gabrielle Nour Kacha and Tania Fawaz on Palestinian Cinema and Transnational Solidarity

Falastin Film Festival (FFF), an event primarily celebrating Palestinian cinema, is back for its third Edinburgh iteration, this year in partnership with the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF). Keen to ensure the programme travels around Scotland, with previous editions in Glasgow, Oban, and Mull, FFF will also visit Dundee in September – which is all the more significant due to Dundee’s twin city status with Nablus in Palestine’s West Bank.

Raising awareness of Palestinian culture and the Zionist occupation, FFF is a key festival in the calendar for all who wish to understand more about Palestinian resistance to colonisation through discussions as well as cinema.

SNACK caught up with FFF co-founder Gabrielle Nour Kacha and co-organiser Tania Fawaz to give us a flavour of what to expect from the 2026 festival.

It’s great to see that FFF is running again in Edinburgh, this time in August. What can we expect in terms of this year’s programme?

Gabrielle: Our events are in collaboration with EAF because we’re partnering with them this year. We have some screenings that FFF have organised by ourselves, and some collaborative events such as the Zifzafa performance with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, which is a big one that we’re really excited about. We have Mo’min Swaitat from the Palestinian Sound Archive who’ll be doing a listening session, a conversation, and a launch party DJing with some local DJs.

In terms of the film programme we always try to have a good variety. We try to feature a variety of experiences as well, whether it’s Palestinians in the West Bank, in Gaza, in camps in Lebanon, or in the diaspora. But we also have Lebanese films, and we have a lot about South Lebanon this year. With everything happening, we’ve kind of given a primary platform to Gaza and South Lebanon.

How did the partnership with EAF come about, and is this the first year it’s happened?

Tania: We’ve worked for the past three years with EAF in many ways, but this year is our first official collaborative partnership with them. This year the programme is a bit different for us, and we saw it as an opportunity to move the festival dates into the Fringe.

Usually we do it in May around Nakba Day (the day that marks the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced or fled from their homes during the creation of the State of Israel). EAF have always helped us in many ways, whether with funding, collaboration, or networking, so it’s lovely to be able to work with them this year on multiple types of events.

I think what concretises it the most is doing Zifzafa with Lawrence Abu Hamdan. The exhibition will be in The Common Guild in Glasgow, but the performance he’ll be doing will be in Leith Theatre on the closing weekend of EAF.

If there’s one thing that we should attend from the programme, what should that be?

Gabrielle: One thing I really like is the opening and closing film selection. We have two opening films this year, one medium-length and one short. Both turn to archival footage, including colonial archival footage, exploring the reappropriation of images that were of us but not destined for us and that served a narrative of our oppression in favour of that oppression, and they are two beautiful films.

And we close with Falastin Futures, with four films that each look to alternative futures. They ask the question of how we resist a narrative around nostalgia, which is so often present in our lives as people who live in a Palestine or a Lebanon that no longer resembles today’s.

Tania: I really love all of the events, but it’s not really an event that is my personal favourite. The aspect that I love the most about this year is that we’re expanding the learning, something we try to do year on year. We have a bigger focus on South Lebanon this year.

We’re really highlighting different types of Israeli occupation in different regions to show that it’s not a singular issue, it’s transnational. And we’re hoping to expand that to the world, to get people thinking about how resistance to oppression and solidarity with different causes function globally. I think that’s my favourite thing, that shared aspect.

You must have seen a vast change in the festival in the last three years?

Gabrielle: I do think it’s more than just a festival. It’s a community. I think that over the last three years we’re really seeing how the community is growing, how the festival is growing, and how our efforts are paying off because people are seeing what we’re doing.

Falastin Film Festival runs in Edinburgh from 14th till 30th August 2026 at multiple venues, in collaboration with Edinburgh Art Festival, and in Dundee from 25th till 27th September, in partnership with Art Workers for Palestine.

falastinfilmfest.com

Photo credit: Matteo Crawford, Jubilea Kucerova