Moving Images is a screening programme by AFA, featuring documentary, experimental and essayistic films on questions that animate our present. Each screening opens into a conversation, with an invited artist, scholar, filmmaker or curator in dialogue with the audience.
Under The Olive Trees brings films by Kamal Aljafari, Jumana Manna, Theo Panagopoulos and the Gazawyat filmmakers to Anant Art on 4 November 2026, as part of Palestine Cinema Days Around the World. Together, they invite us to think of resistance through the persistence of everyday life - gathering herbs, tending to memory, sharing food, telling stories and preserving ways of knowing that exceed the boundaries imposed upon them.
Under The Olive Trees
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms —
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.
-From Different Ways to Pray by Naomi Shihab Nye
Under the Olive Trees brings together seven Palestinian films at Anant Foundation for the Arts as part of the fourth edition of Palestine Cinema Days Around the World. The edition, held under the line "Cinema Across Borders. Stories Beyond Erasure.", asks cinemas and cultural spaces to carry Palestinian images, memories and voices across borders. Our selection takes up this call by exploring the many ways truth is kept alive: through personal and collective archives, women's testimonies, and the knowledge held in land, plants and everyday practices.
In the genre of road film, With Hasan in Gaza by Kamal Aljafari begins with three MiniDV tapes of Gaza from 2001 and unfolds into a road trip through a place and a time that no longer exist. The Gazawyat series brings together four short films by Khaled Tuaima, Shorouq Al-Aila, Aisha Adly and Moayed Abu Ammouneh. Centred on women living through genocide and displacement, the films trace how storytelling, shared rituals and everyday acts of care become ways of holding on to dignity, voice and one another.
The programme's final two films turn to the politics of land and the lives of plants. In Foragers, Jumana Manna follows Palestinians who gather wild plants such as za'atar and 'akkoub, tracing how restrictions on foraging transform an inherited practice of nourishment, ecological knowledge and intergenerational belonging into an act of illegality. In The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, Theo Panagopoulos returns to archival footage of Palestinian wildflowers from the 1930s and 1940s, asking how images of the natural world can become instruments of both erasure and testimony. Together, the films unsettle the distinction between ecological preservation and imperial control, revealing how the management of land, plants and archives can determine whose histories endure and whose relationships with place are allowed to continue.
The films invite us to think of resistance through the persistence of everyday life that entails gathering herbs, tending to memory, sharing food, telling stories and preserving ways of knowing that exceed the boundaries imposed upon them. They ask what it means to protect a landscape when the people who have lived with it for generations are denied the right to gather from it, and what it means to preserve an image when the world it records is being erased.
Following the screenings, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Soumyabrata Choudhury, in conversation with moderator Prachi Satrawal, will reflect on the entanglements of cinema, ecology, everyday and political life in Palestine.
SCHEDULE · Wednesday, 4 November · 3-9 PM
TIME | SESSION | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
3:00 pm | Introduction | Opening Remarks |
3:10 pm | Screening  | With Hasan in Gaza (2025) A search for a former prison mate from 1989, leads to an unexpected road trip from the north to the south of Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. |
5:00 pm | Tea & Refreshments | |
5:30 pm | Screening  | Gazawyat series (2026)
|
6:00 pm | Panel Discussion | Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Soumyabrata Choudhury, in conversation with moderator Prachi Satrawal |
7:00 pm | Tea & Refreshments | |
7:20 pm | Screening  | Foragers (2022) Interweaving documentary and fiction to report a searing conflict between the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and Palestinian foragers. |
8:30 pm | Screening  | The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (2024) Unearthing a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers. |
8:50 pm | Closing Remarks |
Filmmakers
In Conversation
Supported By
Filmlab Palestine
Film Partner
Under The Olive Trees
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms —
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.
-From Different Ways to Pray by Naomi Shihab Nye
Under the Olive Trees brings together seven Palestinian films at Anant Foundation for the Arts as part of the fourth edition of Palestine Cinema Days Around the World. The edition, held under the line "Cinema Across Borders. Stories Beyond Erasure.", asks cinemas and cultural spaces to carry Palestinian images, memories and voices across borders. Our selection takes up this call by exploring the many ways truth is kept alive: through personal and collective archives, women's testimonies, and the knowledge held in land, plants and everyday practices.
In the genre of road film, With Hasan in Gaza by Kamal Aljafari begins with three MiniDV tapes of Gaza from 2001 and unfolds into a road trip through a place and a time that no longer exist. The Gazawyat series brings together four short films by Khaled Tuaima, Shorouq Al-Aila, Aisha Adly and Moayed Abu Ammouneh. Centred on women living through genocide and displacement, the films trace how storytelling, shared rituals and everyday acts of care become ways of holding on to dignity, voice and one another.
The programme's final two films turn to the politics of land and the lives of plants. In Foragers, Jumana Manna follows Palestinians who gather wild plants such as za'atar and 'akkoub, tracing how restrictions on foraging transform an inherited practice of nourishment, ecological knowledge and intergenerational belonging into an act of illegality. In The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, Theo Panagopoulos returns to archival footage of Palestinian wildflowers from the 1930s and 1940s, asking how images of the natural world can become instruments of both erasure and testimony. Together, the films unsettle the distinction between ecological preservation and imperial control, revealing how the management of land, plants and archives can determine whose histories endure and whose relationships with place are allowed to continue.
The films invite us to think of resistance through the persistence of everyday life that entails gathering herbs, tending to memory, sharing food, telling stories and preserving ways of knowing that exceed the boundaries imposed upon them. They ask what it means to protect a landscape when the people who have lived with it for generations are denied the right to gather from it, and what it means to preserve an image when the world it records is being erased.
Following the screenings, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Soumyabrata Choudhury, in conversation with moderator Prachi Satrawal, will reflect on the entanglements of cinema, ecology, everyday and political life in Palestine.
SCHEDULE · Wednesday, 4 November · 3-9 PM
TIME | SESSION | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
3:00 pm | Introduction | Opening Remarks |
3:10 pm | Screening | With Hasan in Gaza (2025) A search for a former prison mate from 1989, leads to an unexpected road trip from the north to the south of Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. |
5:00 pm | Tea & Refreshments | |
5:30 pm | Screening | Gazawyat series (2026)
|
6:00 pm | Panel Discussion | Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Soumyabrata Choudhury, in conversation with moderator Prachi Satrawal |
7:00 pm | Tea & Refreshments | |
7:20 pm | Screening | Foragers (2022) Interweaving documentary and fiction to report a searing conflict between the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and Palestinian foragers. |
8:30 pm | Screening | The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (2024) Unearthing a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers. |
8:50 pm | Closing Remarks |
Filmmakers
In Conversation
Supported By
Filmlab Palestine
Film Partner
AFA FILMS
Under The Olive Trees
As part of Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, these films explore resistance through the persistence of everyday life.
