If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to be among the first to read this conversation and other new writing on and from Palestine.

Since 2020, the Palestine Film Institute’s Palestine Film Platform has hosted the program Film of the Week for 6 months of the year. During this time a new film is launched every Wednesday at 5PM Jerusalem time and available for free during the week, worldwide.

For the month of April, PFP has partnered with Sudan Film Factory. Based in Sudan and diaspora, Sudan Film Factory is a space of making, thinking, and circulation: an art house where cinema is produced, curated, discussed, and set into motion. It brings films into relation with publics, histories, and urgencies, sustaining a practice in which images travel across borders while remaining answerable to the textures of lived experience, memory, and collective imagination.

The films in this program emerge from the heart of a heavy reality, saturated with violence, displacement, and exile, refusing to merely document pain or track the pursuit of devastation. They have transformed into a space for preserving what is meant to be lost, becoming a living voice for what power and war attempt to erase.

This program is rooted in an approach to the aesthetics and ethics of solidarity, an attempt, not without hope, to grasp what has been broken in dominant narratives, and to listen across distances and borders between Sudan and its diasporas, through filmmakers and their audiences, moving between individual experiences and collective pain.

What brings these films together is their presence at the core of today’s urgent questions. They are also part of a broader cinematic voice of Sudanese filmmakers, affirming that their accumulated work is never on the margins of this world; it is an act capable of reconnecting what has been severed and restoring meaning.

The first film, streaming now, is Talking About Trees (2019), directed by Suhaib Gasmelbari.

Visit the Palestine Film Platform to watch this film and check out the rest of the lineup.

On April 8, Brooklyn Public Library welcomes novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi to discuss Paradiso 17, the intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope. Assadi will be in conversation with filmmaker Cherien Dabis, whose latest feature All That’s Left of You came out last year to critical acclaim.

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe. Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile/shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

Find out more and register here.

The Lost Paintings: a Prelude to Return brings the forefront of contemporary Palestinian art to the P21 Gallery in London. After a successful tour in Montreal, Boston and Belfast, P21 will display the work of 53 artists from Palestine and the diaspora in London, and offer compelling programming around it. Tracing the memory of paintings lost to the Nakba, the exhibition examines loss and destruction on one hand, and the power of imagination and art in shaping new futures on the other.

The Lost Paintings artists come together across generations and borders to reimagine the missing works of Maroun Tomb, a Palestinian-Lebanese artist, and his 1947 exhibition in Haifa, that was lost amid the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the Nakba. Drawing on the minimal surviving information of Tomb's last exhibition in Palestine before his forced exile, the contemporary artists’ responses navigate across painting, photography, multi-media, sculpture and video to move between what was, what is and what could be. They do not reconstruct the past, but reclaim it through fragments, gestures, and stories passed across generations.

From Haifa to Gaza, landscapes are revisited not as backgrounds, but as living witnesses; still life is rendered unstable, objects and places teetering between presence and disappearance. Through exploration of colonial violence and its consequences on multiple generations, the exhibition creates a space where memory becomes collective resistance and an act of return, not to what was, but to what still calls. 

Find out more about the exhibition, including a full list of participating artists and opening week guided tours, on the P21 Gallery website.

Join the NYC PYM's Palestinian Youth Choir and experience the revolutionary sounds of the Palestinian prisoners' struggle. Made up of 25 vocalists and 11 band members, the choir will be singing an exclusive and carefully curated setlist of music from the prisoner's movement that will honor dignity, testimonies, and steadfastness of our people.

April 17 will mark the 52nd annual Palestinian Prisoners' Day, a national day of solidarity dedicated to Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, a call for their freedom and rights, and a reminder that our prisoners remain central to achieving collective liberation. The Palestinian prisoners' struggle has been the soul and anchor of the Palestinian movement, spanning decades of European, U.S., and Israeli occupation of our land.

Today, over 9,300 Palestinians are currently imprisoned in Israel’s dungeons, where they’re being starved, tortured, and deprived of basic needs. As Israel advances legislation that would permit the mass execution of Palestinian prisoners and adopts policies designed to degrade these already horrific conditions, we must act now to heed the prisoners’ calls. It is our collective responsibility to carry the Palestinian Prisoners struggle for dignity, expose the Israeli occupation’s brutality against prisoners and demand that every guilty and complicit actor be held responsible, until every Palestinian prisoner is free.

Find more information and get your tickets here. All proceeds from the evening will go towards the Palestinian Youth Movement which recently launched the international campaign, Free All Palestinian Political Prisoners: End the Genocide Behind Bars.

We’re committed to publishing as much of our work as possible for free. But to keep doing that we are now asking those that can afford to, to sign up as subscribers to PalFest. 

For $2 a month, you’ll get new articles on The Key, as well as full access to its growing archive, the PalFest podcast and the Weekly Newsletter.

At $10 a month we’ve organised for 10% discounts at bookshops and publishers around the world, as well as in our own shop. For $15 you’ll get a Bookshelf book selection in the mail every two months, along with unique extras. 

There are even more options at $25 and above - check out our Subscriber tiers and see what might work for you.

October in Lebanon is heavy with memory. The euphoria of the 2019 revolution feels far away, its anniversaries marked by crisis, war and the genocide in Gaza.

Across multiple Octobers, Nur Turkmani meditates on rupture, transformation and the quiet undoing and remaking of relationships during collective catastrophe. Part archive, part love letter, her debut poetry collection holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, spanning balconies and border towns, fig trees and songs for friends, autumn light and the instinct to flee.

Formally spare and emotionally saturated, October refuses both numbness and spectacle. These poems ask what it means to survive the world and still long for it; and how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.

October is out now from Hajar Press.

In 2015, we welcomed Molly Crabapple to the Palestine Festival of Literature. She toured the West Bank and ‘48 with the festival and wrote a deeply affecting dispatch for Vice News from Gaza. When she returned home, she began excavating her family’s history and her great-grandfather’s involvement with the Jewish Bund — a revolutionary movement that was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist that reached its zenith in interwar Europe.

Now, 11 years later, she has written Here Where We Live Is Our Country, an epic history of the Jewish movement that refused Zionism’s pressure to colonize and subjugate another people. It’s been largely erased from history, Molly argues, because of its opposition to Zionism — and her new book is an attempt to ensure it’s not forgotten.

Subscribers will receive the exclusive artwork postcard above, designed by Molly for the PalFest Bookshelf.