The milestone year highlights films that challenge dominant narratives and expand how Palestinian stories are told.
There were no empty seats at last Saturday’s premiere of the 2026 Chicago Palestinian Film Festival, hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center. The sold-out crowd welcomed the festival’s 25th year with the first screening in a 50 film line-up—the biggest in its history.
“I’ve seen an evolution and a growth in Palestinian cinema,” Executive Director Nina Shoman-Dajani said of the five years she’s been at the festival’s helm. “We see more and more people coming out to the festival every year.”
Since 2001, the festival has brought stories of Palestinian life, culture and diaspora to Chicago. The longest-running Palestinian film festival in the world, its mission has remained strong over 25 years—to present stories that capture the diversity, depth and complexity of the Palestinian experience.
“When media is so biased towards Israel you see that the work we do and the films we show serve a very important purpose to spread the Palestinian voice to American audiences,” said a volunteer who wished to remain anonymous.
Bias against Palestine has been prolific across U.S. and European media. One recent study found that major publications in Western countries frequently prioritize Israeli perspectives, frame Palestine around terrorism, erase historical context and sensationalize Palestinian acts of violence without scrutiny.
These narratives have had a real impact on public perception of the conflict in the Middle East. Polling shows that, for decades, sympathy in the U.S. has heavily favored Israel over Palestine. While this trend flipped for the first time in 2026—buoyed by increasingly negative attitudes on Israel’s war in Gaza—there remain strong political divides on the perception of Palestine.
“If we only ever see one thing then people get dehumanized very, very quickly and reduced to numbers,” said Charlotte Knowles, whose documentary “Palestine Comedy Club” has two screenings slated at the festival.
In her film, Knowles uses comedy to explore how Palestinians see and relate to each other across communities.
“Despite being very small as a landmass, the differences in culture from one place to another are really extreme,” she said. “What does it mean to be Palestinian, what does it mean to be from this place?”
Shoman-Dajani told TCR that highlighting the diversity of the Palestinian experience is top of mind when selecting films to screen at the festival. Spanning genres and narrative formats – including documentaries, scripted films and shorts–each film provides a unique perspective on Palestinian identity.
“Identity is a very contemporary topic right now,” said Maxime Lindon, a French filmmaker whose film “Holidays in Palestine” follows a young political leader named Shadi who now lives in exile as a French citizen. “Shadi’s story explores identity as something plural, a chemistry of stories from the past but also of contradictions and something much more complex.”
Films at the festival also capture the historical legacy that is often absent from contemporary coverage of Palestine. Ward Jaraisi’s documentary, “The Untold Intifada 1958,” features the voices of his grandfather and fellow protesters to document an uprising that was largely lost to history.
Jaraisi pointed to the threat of cultural erasure and the need to share these stories with the next generation. “The most important thing for us is the young people,” he said, “that in 20, 30 or 40 years our history will not deleted from this world.”
Getting these stories out can be a difficult task for Palestinian filmmakers—finding distributors in the U.S. is often a challenge, and travel restrictions under the Trump presidency make it difficult for creators to engage with U.S. audiences.
Shoman-Dajani said that they are fortunate to have the support of spaces like the Gene Siskel Film Center, which has hosted the Chicago Palestinian Film Festival for over 20 years, to help them bring attention to these issues through film. “We here in the U.S. feel a responsibility to do what we can to change the policies that are inflicting the harm,” she said.
Director Colette Ghunim believes that platforms like the Chicago Palestinian Film Festival have a powerful impact on culture. Her documentary, “Traces of Home,” opened the festival on Saturday in something of a full circle moment for the filmmaker—Ghunim had first been involved with the festival as a volunteer a decade ago.
“Festivals are actually quite revolutionary,” said Ghunim, reflecting on the powerful reactions she’d seen to her film, which explores generational trauma through her Palestinian and Mexican heritage. “They are bringing communities together to talk about very difficult topics we don’t get to talk about on the day-to-day so that we can mobilize together.”
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival will run through April 30. The full schedule and tickets can be found online.