Bristol Palestine Film Festival 2026
Bristol Palestine Film Festival returns from 25 November to 6 December 2026 with TESTIMONY, a compelling programme of Palestinian cinema exploring memory, identity, resistance and the power of bearing witness.
Palestinian lives are so often encountered through news footage and statistics. The films in this year's programme offer something different: individual voices and stories of family and displacement, home and memory, survival and resistance. They move between Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, Europe and Palestinian communities across the world, and across fiction and documentary, photography and conversation, personal memory and historical investigation.
The sabra cactus, which appears throughout this year's festival artwork, is a fitting emblem for TESTIMONY. Long used as a living boundary around Palestinian villages, it has often endured after those villages were depopulated or destroyed. Resilient and difficult to erase, the sabra speaks to memory, survival and the persistence of what remains.
The festival opens at Watershed on Wednesday 25 November with American Doctor and closes on Sunday 6 December with Chronicles From the Siege. In between, audiences can enjoy a rich programme of fiction and documentary films, conversations with filmmakers, live music, poetry, and Palestine Through the Lens – a photography exhibition at The Island. Events take place across five venues in Bristol – full programme information and ticket links for events taking place outside Watershed can be found on the festival's website.
Presented with the support of the BFI Film Exhibition Fund, awarding funds from the National Lottery, and with thanks to Unite the Union.
Upcoming screenings in this season
American Doctor
classified 18Partially Subtitled screening
Three American physicians volunteer in Gaza’s devastated hospitals. An urgent, intimate documentary about medical solidarity, impossible choices and the responsibility to bear witness to suffering.
The Reports on Sarah and Saleem
classified 18Subtitled screening
A secret affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man spirals into a political investigation. Muayad Alayan’s gripping Jerusalem drama explores intimacy, surveillance and unequal power.
Conversation with the Sea
classified 18Subtitled screening
A Jerusalem father is ordered by an Israeli court to pay his drowned son's debt. With no record of the death, he sets out to discover what really happened.
Edward Said: Between Worlds
classified 18Partially Subtitled screening
Using rare archives and Edward Said’s own words, this documentary traces his life in exile, intellectual awakening and enduring influence on debates about Palestine, culture and power.
Concrete Land
classified 18Subtitled screening
On the edge of Amman, an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family faces eviction as luxury villas rise around their tents. A tender portrait of displacement, belonging and a ten-year-old's fight for acceptance.
Landscapes of Memory + panel discussion
classified 18 Bristol Palestine Film Festival
A filmmaker's search for her family's Holocaust history in Germany collides with the present, asking how memory culture can honour lives without being co-opted to perpetuate harm.
Revolutionaries Never Die
classified 18Subtitled screening
Mohanad Yaqubi answers a collaboration request from the late Jocelyne Saab, weaving her archive into a lyrical portrait of a filmmaker who documented the Palestinian revolution and the war in Lebanon.
Chronicles From the Siege
classified 18Subtitled screening
Inspired by the director's experience of the siege of Yarmouk camp, a drama of ordinary lives for whom hunger and cold turn the smallest gestures into matters of survival.