Eindhoven, October 2025

Spotlight on
Palestinian Filmmaking

The ‘Spotlight on Palestinian Filmmaking’ is a initiative lead by 2025 graduates in response to the institutional silence of the Design Academy of Eindhoven regarding the ongoing genocide in Palestine. During the Graduation Show on Tuesday, 21st of October, we are organizing a voluntary call for action from the student body not to show our films. Instead, throughout the day, emerging Palestinian filmmakers will be invited to screen their work. The action will take place underground in Space 1 of the show. In the evening, we will host a panel discussion at Lab-1 with several of the filmmakers, moderated by Noor Abed—an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, and Mahmoud Beshtawi—filmmaker based in Brussels.

Showing Now
at Microstad:

These movies are currently on view at Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show at Microstad, Eindhoven (NL) in Space 1 (Basement) from 11 a.m. until 18 p.m. on October 21th.

1. Akka on my mind
50"

by Mahmoud Beshtawi
@mahmoud.beshtawi

Mahmoud Beshtawi from occupied Akka is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels.

Palestinian filmmaker Mahmoud Beshtawi confronts the story of Maryoma, an illegal immigrant woman from Bangladesh, Khaled, a Syrian kid that fled the war in Aleppo and the filmmaker, a Palestinian refugee whose grandfather had to leave Akka in 1948. These three stories meet in the camp of Chatila. This documentary aims to showcase the diversity of lives in this camp that has become a shelter where everyone can recreate their own Akka. The camp became a symbol of homeland for all the displaced people.

2. A Message
5"

by Mama Ganuush
@mamaganuush

Mama Ganuush is a trans Palestinian performance artist, filmmaker, organizer, and activist whose work is a potent and unflinching expression of Palestinian futurism. Based between San Francisco and Lisbon, their performances are a powerful synthesis of Palestinian folk art and music, the elegance of Egyptian golden-era dance, and the raw, spontaneous energy of clown and theater.

A short documentary film capturing the queer Palestinian voices in exile fighting cultural erasure by zionism, pinkwashing, and other colonial propaganda. This film amplifies the collective struggle for queer and trans liberation, standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s fight for dignity, freedom, and justice. It challenges the pinkwashing tactics of mainstream LGBTQ institutions, exposing their complicity in oppression while uplifting grassroots resistance.

3. A Night We Held Between
30”

Noor Abed
@noor_abed

Noor Abed is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed.

The film centers around “Song for The Fighters,” which was found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act. The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine—caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys—the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

4. Geography of Pottery
5"

Raghad Saqfalhait
@raghad.saqfalhait

Raghad Saqfalhait is a Palestinian architect and design researcher. Her work engages with material cultures and agrarian craft ecologies in Palestine through long-term and collaborative projects. Public workshops and oral history are central to her methodology, through which local materials become sites of embodied land-based knowledge production amidst ongoing dispossession and fragmentation under settler colonialism.

Geography of Pottery (2022) reconstructs the disappearing local know-how of pottery making in Al-Jib by tracing what remains of Jabal Al-Mattayin, the village’s main source of clay that was confiscated and annexed by Israel in 2005 as part of its broader settler-colonial strategies of land fragmentation and dispossession.

5. Solomon's Stone
25"

Ramzi Maqdisi
@maqdisiramzi

Ramzi Maqdisi is a Palestinian filmmaker and actor. Using subtle, subversive and visual storytelling, his work seeks to convey an experience of the overwhelming nature of occupation through zooming in on the tiny details that we all, as humans, share.

Hussein, a Palestinian young man, receives a letter from the Israeli post office to appear in person to receive a package. He has to pay the sum of 20.000 $ US dollars in order to collect that package. Hussein’s curiosity to find out what the package contains drives him to sell everything he owns, despite the outright rejection of his mother, the matter that changes their lives afterwards.
The story is adapted from the novel Blue Light by Hussein Barghouty.

6. Immobilization

Raghad Saqfalhait
@raghad.saqfalhait

Raghad Saqfalhait is a Palestinian architect and design researcher. Her work engages with material cultures and agrarian craft ecologies in Palestine through long-term and collaborative projects. Public workshops and oral history are central to her methodology, through which local materials become sites of embodied land-based knowledge production amidst ongoing dispossession and fragmentation under settler colonialism.

Tonight:

at @LAB1, 8pm panel discussion with Noor Abed & Mahmoud Beshtawi.