Queer Cinema for Palestine 2025

Teyama Alkamli is an award-winning filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. Her visually tender and deeply human work deals predominantly with issues of identity, sexuality, displacement and migration. She is an alumna of DocNomads, the European Mobile Film School, Hot Docs Emerging Filmmaker Lab, TIFF Writers’ Studio, and the Canadian Film Centre’s Director Lab.

In 2021 Teyama’s mid-length documentary, Hockey Mom, won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary Program. Her films have screened worldwide at festivals such as TIFF, Berlinale, and Doc Lisboa.

Raghed Charabaty is an experienced Lebanese-Canadian director (drama, comedy) based in Toronto and Beirut. Charabaty’s films have won at the Toronto International Film Festival: Canada’s Top Ten, and his repertoire of original works have screened at over 100 film festivals worldwide.

Dana Dawud is a Palestinian artist and writer exploring internet images and philosophies.

Omar Gabriel is a Lebanese filmmaker whose work explores love, societal pressure, and the courage to break free. With a raw, poetic aesthetic, he amplifies marginalized voices and tells stories of resistance and defiance.

Tara Hakim is a multi-disciplinary process-based artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. Originally Palestinian, born and raised in Jordan with an Austrian grandmother, Tara creates public displays of vulnerability that invite the viewer to meditate on notions of self, diasporic existences, and spaces in between – both physically and mentally. Working across video, installation, performance, and, more recently, textiles and ceramics, she intertwines the complexities of cultural history and personal psychology with an experimental, playful, and tender approach.

Dima Hamdan is an award-winning filmmaker based in Berlin. Her last short film, Blood Like Water (2024, Palestine), won the Best Short Narrative awards in the Brooklyn Film Festival and Through Women’s Eyes Film Festival in Florida. Currently on a festival tour, the film has been to nearly 40 festivals so far, including the Bafta-Qualifying Galway Film Festival and Melbourne Film Festival.

Hannah Hull (they/them) (UK) is an artist and musician, also known as Burning Salt. The ancient practice of ‘burning salt’ is an act of expulsion, purification or protection. Hull uses song, poetry, drawing, animation and film to these ends. They studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. After a decade of specialism in socially-engaged art, Hull is currently focused on exploring somatic practices and trauma. They are also a boat dweller, TEDx speaker, intersectional feminist, queer person and recovering addict.

Robin Riad is an experimental filmmaker, film programmer, and visual artist. Robin works with analogue mediums, and enjoys exploring the materiality of film in her work. She has screened in countries such as Canada, the United States, Spain, Italy, Germany, India and more. When not making films, Robin spends her time teaching workshops, making potions in the darkroom, and volunteering at local arts organizations.