2026 Feature Singles

A makeshift movie theater showing the Pixar animated movie “Up” captivated children in a displacement camp in Gaza City. After more than two years of war, many in Gaza were forced to live in improvised tent camps amid the rubble without access to running water or electricity. The ceasefire had ended most of the fighting. But nearly everyone in Gaza still faced grim prospects, particularly the children, most of whom had gone two years without real schooling, adequate nutrition, decent medical care or a peaceful night’s sleep.

Palestinian survivors gather in collective prayer atop the rubble of a mosque destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Having lost homes, safety, and the physical space of worship itself, they reassemble what cannot be erased: ritual, memory, and belief. The mosque no longer exists as architecture, yet it persists through bodies aligned in prayer. Faith here is not anchored to walls, but carried through repetition and presence. What unfolds is not an act of resistance staged for the camera, but a quiet continuation of life after rupture. No violence is shown. Only its echo visible in the debris beneath their foreheads, and in the silence that surrounds a gesture repeated despite loss. Prayer becomes a way of inhabiting absence, transforming devastation into a moment of collective endurance.

Palestinians Ali Marouf and his mother Aisha cook with a fire they started on the roof of their destroyed house, destroyed by the Israeli army's air and ground offensive, in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, on Monday, March 17, 2025.