DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Cinema served as a unifying ground in Davao for solidarity with Palestine as indie filmmakers and enthusiasts held a month-long film screening that raised funds for the humanitarian relief mission in Gaza.
The event, “Voices of the Land: Films for Peace & Justice” was convened by Handala Project Philippines with the film community groups Pasalidahay and The Green House Cinema, which held screenings on Sundays in the month of September.
The screenings showed 25 local and international full-length and short films and documentaries, organized along four themes: Returning Home, Life Goes On, Creativity as Resistance, and The Past and the Future.
Organizers said that the films highlighted parallel struggles —Filipino indigenous people fighting to defend land and dignity, and Palestinians fighting for survival amidst the war and displacement.
The screenings brought together artists, students, and indie film enthusiasts to discuss survival, resistance, and community memory through films.
During the opening night on September 6, a forum with Palestinian and Mindanao filmmakers lasted two hours where they shared similar stories of legacy, filmmaking and dreams of justice for their lands.
“This program is about listening to communities that have long spoken through their art and their bravery. By sharing these stories side by side, from our rivers to their seas, we urge our audiences to reflect, stand in solidarity, and act,” stated Neo Bryce, film curator and programmer of Pasalidahay.
Two documentaries by Mindanao filmmakers were shown on opening night. Gutierrez Mangansakan’s 2001 film House Under the Crescent Moon focused on her grandfather’s ancestral house turned into an evacuation center during President Estrada’s 2000 all-out war. Jean Claire Dy’s 2020 documentary A House in Pieces presents the grief of Meranaw families losing their homes and sense of place in the aftermath of the Marawi Siege.
Mangansakan later reflected that the history of the Bangsamoro and the Palestinians “is bound by a shared experience of dispossession, marginalization, and the unrelenting fight for self-determination. Both peoples carry the scars of colonization and State violence.”
The Handala Project announced that the film screenings raised ?38,171 from ticket sales and donations.
“Thank you to everyone who showed up, watched, donated, and stood in solidarity with Palestine throughout this month-long screening series. Every peso is part of a bigger movement,” the group said in their Facebook page.
The fundraising is part of a global response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza caused by the war staged by Israel since October 2023, killing thousands including children.
The United Nations has declared Gaza under Phase 5 famine status, the highest levels with more than half a million residents have been going through extreme famine and preventable deaths. The International Association of Genocide Scholars put Israeli behavior in Gaza fit to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention definition of a genocide.
According to Health Ministry records, 65,062 Palestinians have been killed in conflict and 165,697 have been wounded. (davaotoday.com)
