The 2025 Doha Film Festival (DFF), running from November 20-28, has decided to hand its stage to Palestine. At a moment when so many Palestinian lives are under fire and their histories risk being wiped away, the Doha Film Institute is refusing to look away, instead, centering films that demand we remember.
The programme is stacked. Opening with The Voice of Hind Rajab by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, the film that won the prestigious Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and made history with its record-breaking standing ovation, the festival is already setting the tone. Hind’s story—a six-year-old’s final emergency calls from inside a car in Gaza—has haunted the world, and on-screen it becomes even more unbearable and necessary.
Then there’s Once Upon a Time in Gaza by Tarzan and Arab Nasser, a gritty dive into Gaza in 2007, tracing the lives of a student, a drug dealer, and a cop caught in cycles of violence. Kamal Aljafari’s With Hassan in Gaza turns inward, combing through memory and loss like an open wound, while Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 pulls us back to 1936 and the Mandate era, reminding us that what’s happening today didn’t appear out of nowhere, but is rooted in decades of dispossession.
In addition to the film screenings, part-Palestinian hitmaker Saint Levant will also be performing at DFF as part of its new music programme, which was launched as a powerful intersection between film and music.
This kind of programming is not without precedent. Film festivals have long been frontline battlegrounds for cultural resistance: the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia consistently foregrounds African and Arab struggles; the Berlinale has become a stage for dissident voices; and closer to home, El Gouna International Film Festival has similarly spotlighted Palestinian filmmakers. Yet Doha’s platform feels particularly urgent, arriving at a moment when Arab institutions are being called upon to move beyond symbolism into active solidarity.
Cinema’s power lies precisely here in its ability to humanize, to archive memory against attempts at erasure, and to spark global dialogue. When politics fails, art matters, and festivals like Doha’s step in to carry those silenced voices and keep memory alive.
The 2025 Doha Film Festival will spread across Katara Cultural Village, Msheireb Downtown, and the Museum of Islamic Art, turning the city itself into a living cultural exchange of sorts. In doing so, it not only affirms the Doha Film Institute’s mission to nurture Arab voices but also transforms the act of watching films into an act of witness.