The Palestine Film Institute

The Palestine Film Institute is not an archive of reels; it is the infrastructure that a national cinema needs in order to have an archive at all. Established in 2019 by a group of Palestinian film workers, it describes itself as an independent Palestinian-led non-profit that supports, connects and sustains the ecosystem of Palestinian cinema across geographies — the last phrase carrying the whole problem, since Palestinian filmmakers are distributed across the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, the camps and a global diaspora, under conditions that make ordinary professional infrastructure impossible.

Four of its programmes matter to researchers. The Palestine Film Directory indexes Palestinian films and the people who make them, and is the most direct route to establishing what exists and who made it. The Palestine Film Platform is a curated streaming season with a rotating film of the week. The Palestine Film Fund awards production grants, publishes its guidelines, eligibility criteria and grantee list, and is therefore a record of what is being made now. The Palestine Film Hub coordinates Palestinian presence at festivals — Cannes, IDFA, the Berlinale, Sheffield, Durban, TIFF, CPH:DOX — and its year-by-year festival pages amount to an accidental chronology of Palestinian cinema’s international circulation, running from 2020 to the present.

The Institute states its purpose in terms that are unusually explicit for a film body: it frames cinema “as a tool for Palestinian liberation, not only cultural expression,” and works to remove the barriers that restrict Palestinian filmmakers’ access to resources, audiences and professional networks. Its stated vision is a cinema “recognised, preserved, studied, and widely accessible on its own terms, grounded in narrative sovereignty” — and the Institute lists preservation, alongside development and circulation, as one of the three things its programmes are built to support over the long term. For a cinema whose historic material is dispersed across half a dozen countries and several vanished institutions, that ordering is the argument.

Practical note: this is an active institutional site rather than a stable catalogue, and its festival and season pages are periodically restructured. For citation, prefer the directory entry for a film over a festival page, and record the date of access.

Sources

• About the Institute — purpose, mission and vision, Palestine Film Institute