Abstract This article examines the 2023 edition of Palestine Cinema Days Around the World (PCDATW), organized in November 2023 at 171 screening sites globally as a response to the 2023 war on Gaza. I consider this festival, which reconfigured a former annual festival in Palestine suspended by the 2023 war and genocide, as an example of cultural resistance that adapts the concept of sumud to the post-2023 reality. Contextualizing it within existing literature on film festival studies, ongoing debates about the politics of visibility and visual representation in Palestine and Gaza, the history and development of the festival itself, and the representations of Gaza conveyed by the films screened at the festival, this study argues that the festival and many of the films screened contest media narratives of Gaza, Palestinians, and the 2023 war that dominated global news coverage during the festival. Both by continuing to hold a version of the festival and through the screened films’ depictions of Palestinian cultural and embodied practices of resilience, PCDATW reimagines sumud as a mode of global, visually mediated solidarity that contests depictions of Gazans as helpless, violent, and abject and evinces a continued belief in the liberating power of images to contest dominant narratives.
Drew Paul (Wed,) studied this question.