In October 2023, the Montreal-based film collective Regards Palestiniens gathered for an impromptu meeting. We had just locked the program for our sixteenth annual three-day screening series to be held the following month, a series the collective had been organizing since 2007 in an effort to bring Palestinian perspectives and voices to the big screen. However, we now found ourselves in a different present. The program—curated around the theme Generations of Nakba—was put together to frame the decades-long temporality of the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism. But the rapidly escalating Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank demanded a new urgency and focus in our programming. We decided not to hastily call off the original event, despite questions arising in the room regarding the purpose and pertinence of screenings during an unfolding genocide. Instead, we chose to precede it with a more immediate priority, a collaborative fundraiser screening, and we began to discuss possible changes to our format moving forward. As such, while our work builds on more than a decade of organizing Palestinian film screenings, this marked a first in a series of ongoing conversations in which we questioned our purpose and practice as a collective, with the subsequent fundraiser setting in motion two years of more regular screenings and collaborations.

We have since continued to ask ourselves how curation might more broadly function as a tool for political education, public conversation, and collective mobilization. Indeed, it became clear to us in the past two years that our programming needed to take on a more explicitly collaborative and wider public-facing approach. Practically, this has entailed creating new spaces for community gatherings and public conversations, both through our programming and our loosely facilitated post-screening discussions. In these discussions, we have affirmed our commitment to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). PACBI is but one tangible step we can take at this time in the realm of the cultural sector, and we continue to encourage other organizations, institutions, and stakeholders to go ahead and join the Palestinian-led campaign. Our screenings also began to take on the work of fundraising for Palestinians in Gaza, extending the scope of curation into community mobilization. In this way, a set of questions emerged in our collective project: Should our programming ethos be guided primarily by a notion of radical film programming as an effective political-educational tool? Or must art exhibited in this time of genocide mobilize concrete material support for Palestinians? Or should it, first and foremost, confront the complicity of the international community—including our own university administrations and our city, provincial, and federal representatives—in the destruction of Gaza and the routine maintenance of an Israeli apartheid state?

We have attempted to balance these sometimes contradictory impulses, prioritizing urgency while also keeping the long term in mind—the slower, methodical work of political education and organization that will carry us forward. In an effort to reconcile these approaches, we have had to become more mobile, bringing Palestinian films into new and different spaces across the city, often co-organizing screenings with venues and other organizations, including La Sala Rossa, Cinéma Public, articule, Labour 4 Palestine (L4P), Regards Noirs, Hors champ, Access in the Making Lab (AIM Lab) at Concordia University, and the Critical Media Lab as well as the 2024 student encampment at McGill. Given fluctuating availability and capacity, different members take the lead on different projects to keep up our programming and broaden our audiences from students and workers to seniors, families, and Francophone, Anglophone, and Arabic linguistic communities.

Our first event in this more collaborative direction was the fundraiser screening we organized at the performance venue La Sala Rossa on November 14, 2023, to support medical relief efforts in besieged Gaza. Since 1932, La Sala Rossa has made itself known as a welcoming place to gather, historically for Jewish and Spanish immigrants and more broadly for socially engaged artists and activists, making it an obvious setting for a Palestine solidarity screening. A coalition of local cultural organizations (Hors champ, Dhakira Collective, Feminist Media Studio, zoom out, Cinema Politica, Cinéma Public, Main Film, Le Sémaphore, Palestiniens et juifs unis/Palestinian and Jewish Unity [PAJU]) supported our program under the banner From the River to the Sea: Solidarity Fundraiser Screening. The program we curated, titled Gaza: Between Images and Bodies, comprised five short films centered on Gaza: from the meticulous clarity of Lethal Warning: The Killing of Luai Kahlil and Amir al-Nimrah (2018), by Forensic Architecture; to the more experimental and subjective responses to Israel’s ongoing wars on Gaza and Palestine in Oraib Toukan’s Offing (2021) and Rehab Nazzal’s Vibrations from Gaza (2023); to critical documentary films by Mustafa Abu Ali (Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza, 1973) and Mohamed Harb (Gaza Death Tunnel, 2013), the works frame speech, reportage, oral testimony, and history as significant forms of discursive resistance, while also juxtaposing different visual forms and grammars: archival, forensic, experimental. It was at this event that we began to increase our emphasis on the post-screening discussion, translating discursive practices recorded onscreen into the physical space, and making discussion itself an extension of the films’ political and expressive work.

In this sense, curating has become more than just programming for the collective. I have begun to think of the conversations that emerge between viewers and the subjects onscreen, among audience members after the projection, and between curators and audiences as a form of collective praxis: a moment to encounter our own relation to the Palestinian struggle, a process that necessarily involves confronting and negotiating different, often uneven, positionalities. After that first Sala Rossa screening, a friend intimated to me her immense feeling of relief of being in a space, at least temporarily, where she was not made to feel crazy and isolated by the denials that shape the quotidian reporting about Palestine. While our events were often hastily produced and organized under conditions of increased institutional scrutiny, they also allowed the possibility of slowing down: to sit together and watch long-form films, rather than the fragmented, rapidly circulating images we encounter on individual phone screens and social media platforms. By bringing audiences together in new constellations, these screenings renewed the collective’s original orientation to political cinema as a site of collective learning and conversation. At a time when public expressions of solidarity—speech in support of Palestine—are routinely met with policing and condemnation, the screening became a space to gather, reflect, exchange, grieve, and talk. When Labour 4 Palestine organizers led a discussion after a screening of three films on the subject of labor conditions in Palestine (Gaza Death Tunnel; The Living of the Pigeons, 2015; Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production, 2024) at the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) union headquarters, they linked Palestine liberation to local and global worker solidarity, offering tangible ways for workers in Montreal to intervene in the struggle.

The collective has also been met with heightened policing and repression. Our relationships with several larger Montreal institutions have been strained or severed—most notably Concordia University and the Cinéma du Parc, where we have been subjected to cancellation and censorship. Two of our screenings were canceled last minute: a Jocelyne Saab retrospective organized in solidarity with Palestine at Cinéma du Parc on November 6, 2023, and a screening of Christian Ghazi’s Resistance, Why? (1971) at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia on October 11, 2024. While the cancellations were intended to stop the events from taking place, they failed to fully silence us. The Saab retrospective quickly evolved into a sit-in turned teach-in at the cinema when several organizers took to the mic to connect histories of censorship in Montreal to the Palestinian struggle, and to explain what role people can play in both. The Ghazi screening was transformed into an outdoor event, with the film projected onto a university wall, attracting both students and passersby. These instances of repression and censorship also prompted the formation of new local initiatives such as the Coalition des arts de Montréal pour la Palestine (CAMP), a small group of artists and cultural workers who organize educational workshops and projects inviting cultural institutions across the city to endorse PACBI. The number of local signatories continues to grow, reflecting the broader increase in support for this by now twenty-year-old campaign.

In retrospect, while the images themselves might not immediately change global material conditions and realities on the ground, Regards Palestiniens has learned that creating a space for strangers, community members, friends, and colleagues to gather, reflect, and engage—to offer political education through Palestinian cinema—has not been futile. Of course, the work we are doing feels painfully inadequate to the task of responding to the horrors that Palestinians are being confronted with daily. But this work has sharpened our attentiveness and helped us map our strength so that we can continue our active involvement in the struggles that link Palestine and Montreal.