Leeds Palestinian Film Festival Returns to Celebrate Cinema and Resilience – Interview

Yalla Parkour Lead Image. Image Credit: Leeds Palestinian Film Festival.

The Leeds Palestinian Film Festival returns this autumn, running from 12 November to 6 December 2025, with screenings and events across ten venues citywide. Now in its 11th year, the festival continues to celebrate the richness, diversity and resilience of Palestinian culture through cinema. From the Hyde Park Picture House to community spaces across Leeds, the festival promises over three weeks of powerful stories that amplify voices of resistance and hope. 

Directors Helena and Frances spoke with TSOTA about the festival’s beginnings, its remarkable growth, and why Palestinian film matters now more than ever.

When Leeds Palestinian Film Festival launched over a decade ago, the idea was simple: use film to humanise Palestinians and counter the flat, hostile narratives dominating Western media.

“It was a few people involved with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign who thought film would be a good way of getting the message out to people,” Frances recalls. “The people who first founded it weren’t necessarily passionate about cinema, but passionate about Palestine. They saw film as a way of showing real human lives and a broader picture of Palestinian experience which you don’t get through the media.”

The early years were modest. “We started on such a small scale,” Frances laughs. “Only six films in the first year, and not even in a proper cinema. We had a film in a room above a bookshop where we stuck bin bags over the windows to black it out.”

Image Credit: Leeds Palestinian Film Festival.

Today, the festival is a fixture of the Leeds cultural scene — a transformation built through steady learning and deepening collaboration. “We’ve gained experience in where to source films, how to curate a programme, the whole promotion side,” Frances says. “We’re now much more ambitious. We work with cultural venues across the city, we receive financial support from Leeds City Council, and we feel very well established.”

Both directors admit that the scale of Palestinian filmmaking and the potential for the festival took them by surprise. “In the first few years, I naively assumed we’d run out of films,” Frances says. “But year on year there are more and more, to the point that now we struggle to view everything people submit.”

Helena agrees. “The arts scene, and film in particular, is unbelievably strong. Palestinians are deeply committed to filmmaking as a way of helping the world hear their voices. I don’t think we’ll ever run out — if anything, it’s getting stronger.” She highlights that filmmakers created many of this year’s films during the most recent period of violence in Gaza, reflecting both the urgency and resilience of cultural production under siege.

A market-style display table filled with Palestinian crafts and products. The table features hand-embroidered purses and coin pouches, painted ceramic bowls and plates in blue and white patterns, olive oil bottles, wooden items, postcards, and small woven decorations hanging from the table edge. A small Palestinian flag stands among the items, and people are visible in the background.

One of the programme’s centrepieces, ‘Women, Film and Resistance in Gaza’ (27 November), pays tribute to the first Gaza International Festival of Women’s Cinema (GIFWC) taking place in Gaza city in October 2025. “The filmmaker organising the festival in Gaza wanted to screen the work of women filmmakers. To continue making and watching cinema in the rubble is a remarkable signifier of cultural resistance and preservation,” Helena explains. 

Another premiere, The Loud Silence (4 December), brings the focus closer to home. The short documentary follows Women in Black, a Leeds-based group holding weekly vigils for Palestine. “Women in Black had been doing a weekly vigil for several years,” Frances explains. “Last October, a filmmaker called Juman arrived from Ramallah to study in Leeds. After October 7th, she was devastated, but she saw our vigil in the street. It lifted her so much that she came over to speak to us and we became very close friends.” Juman decided to make a film about the group. “She convinced us that it is important for Palestinians to see that people are supporting them,” Frances says. 

Women in Black. Image Credit: Leeds Palestinian Film Festival.

As the violence in Palestine intensifies, the cultural and political stakes of the festival rise with it. “Every single film I’ve ever watched has taught me something I didn’t know,” Frances says. Helena adds that this is precisely the power of the festival: “Powerful institutions silence and suppress Palestinian voices so much that presenting their art on the world stage becomes extremely difficult. Israel has a huge propaganda machine which dominates the narrative, making it difficult to contemplate another perspective.” The festival creates this much-needed safe space for complexity, nuance and learning.

One example is Palestine 36 (20 November), a new drama exploring life under British rule in 1930s Palestine. “It’s incredible how suppressed the narrative around European colonialism is,” Helena says. “But this film demonstrates how instrumental Britain was in creating the situation now — long before October 7th.”

Opening night of Leeds Palestinian Film Festival 2025. Image Credit: Garry Clarkson/Leeds Palestinian Film Festival.

At the same time, the festival remains welcoming to those who might feel intimidated by the often divisive political discourse. “You can also just come in, sit in the dark and enjoy a film,” Frances says. “You don’t have to join discussions. You don’t need to know anything. You can simply watch and maybe take something new away — even if it’s just one new thought.”

What Helena and Frances hope audiences carry with them is curiosity, empathy and a sense of shared humanity. “I hope people see Palestine in a different light,” Frances says. “I want them to leave wanting to know more.”

For Helena, the festival is also a safeguard against cultural erasure. “My anxiety is that if the mainstream media moves on, Palestine will drop off the agenda even though nothing is improving for people on the ground. If we don’t keep talking and keep people interested, it will get buried.”

Opening night of Leeds Palestinian Film Festival 2025. Image Credit: Garry Clarkson/Leeds Palestinian Film Festival.

Leeds Palestinian Film Festival kicked off on 12 November with Areeb Zuaiter’s ‘Yalla Parkour’, screened in collaboration with LIFF,  and it certainly keeps everyday violation of freedoms on the agenda. 

The documentary follows Areeb, a Palestinian director living in the US, as she navigates her fractured identity through a decade-long online friendship with Ahmed, a young parkour artist in Gaza. A childhood memory of visiting Gaza, her mother smiling by the sea, becomes a touchstone for a home she belongs to but doesn’t fully know. Through Areeb and Ahmed’s conversations, we glimpse both the destruction of bombings and the quiet heartbreak of trying to secure visas, reconnect with family and nurture dreams that the world repeatedly denies. Yalla Parkour is devastating in its clarity, but full of joy too: young people laughing, leaping and insisting on keeping hope alive. 

The film sets a powerful tone for the weeks ahead: cinema is not just storytelling. It is memory, resistance and survival.

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Leeds Palestinian Film Festival officially began on 12 November and on 20th November they will be screening ‘Palestine 36’ as their highlight event. For the full programme, visit their website or follow their Instagram for up-to-date information.