The festival opens with Michel Khleifi, a Palestinian filmmaker born in Nazareth, exiled in Belgium, who laid the first stone of Palestinian cinema in the fullest sense. His body of work — from Fertile Memory (1980) to Route 181 (2003) — runs through the festival like a guiding thread. Khleifi will be in Tunis for a public conversation on April 5th, alongside filmmaker Ahmed Mahmoud.

The pioneering films of Mustafa Abu Ali, PLO archives, the Tokyo Reels programme: a dive into the first decades of a cinema born in the camps, with limited means and acute political consciousness. These films are not relics. They are tools.

Screenings dedicated to the most recent works on Gaza, featuring artists — Basma Alsharif, Larissa Sansour, Mona Hatoum, Jumana Manna — who have turned to experimental form, science fiction and video art to say what classic documentary can no longer say alone

Mahdi Fleifel and Ahmed Mahmoud embody a generation that inherits everything — militancy, exile, archives, fiction — and seeks its own language. Their works form the living thread of the programme, the link between memory and the present.