2025 EDITION:
VIRTUAL REMAINS

Marking the ten-year anniversary of the Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam, the 2025 edition Virtual Remains takes Gaza as its central focus. In the words of contemporary poet Huda Fakhreddine:

Gaza is a locus and ethos; it is a signpost in place that has also become a source point of time. And as readers of Arabic poetry know well, a place can have agency. It can become all of time, past, present, and future. Gaza is our eternal talal, our oracle-ruins. […] It will retell all history before and direct all history after it. (The Markaz Review, January 2025)

As a signpost in place and a source point of time, Gaza is a turning point globally, and it is also a marker of the long-felt conditions of virtuality that have in part defined Palestinian experience since the 1948 Al Nakba [the catastrophe] when the mass displacement, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israeli state began.

With the abundance of dystopian and apocalyptic images saturating viewers’ senses for two years by the time we gather in October, Virtual Remains opens up the question: how do we as receivers of this image stream inhabit imaginaries of Gaza and of Palestine, and how do they, as locus and ethos, inhabit us? Starting here, the 2025 festival is a reflection on virtuality in all its dimensions: as representation, imagination, index, projection, embodiment, and the truth claims attached to (moving) images.

This year’s festival will once again unfold over four days, beginning with an opening night premiere on Thursday, 9 October and continuing with day and evening activities throughout the weekend. Alongside our rich programme of screenings featuring over twenty-five films by Palestinian directors with special introductions and post-screening discussions, this year’s festival also comprises a range of parallel events, including a series of dialogue sessions and hands-on workshops, as well as our always popular olive oil tasting and a very special culinary storytelling keynote.