Gaza Women's Cinema Festival Names 2026 Winners

A local short carries the festival’s top national prize

At the Gaza International Festival for Women's Cinema's October 31 closing ceremony, Hanadi Abu Salah's Remnants of Light won the Golden Orange in the national short-film competition. The festival's earlier opening-film description says Abu Salah works from memories of relatives lost in the war and the remains of her home, trying to turn those traces toward hope for others. The award recognizes a specific act of filmmaking: a woman choosing how to make private loss visible in a public image.

That premise can easily be reduced to a slogan about resilience. The harder artistic task is to hold on to the particularity of a family while allowing strangers into the story. An object or damaged room may matter because someone once used it, not because it serves as a general symbol. A short film has little time to establish that relationship; its selection of what to show and what to leave outside the frame becomes central. The prize directs attention to the director's control of that selection. It also asks an audience to meet her work as a film with form and perspective, rather than treating its subject as sufficient evidence of its achievement.

Another prize goes to a household under pressure

The international feature-fiction Golden Orange went to Erige Sehiri's A Sky Without Land, the title used in the Gaza festival's announcement. Cannes presented Sehiri's 2025 film as Promis le ciel, or Promised Sky: its profile follows Marie, an Ivorian pastor in Tunisia, whose home shelters Naney and Jolie before a young orphan joins them. Gaza also awarded Farida Marzouk for the film's cinematography.

The household premise makes solidarity physical. A home has rooms, doors and limits; taking in one more person changes who sleeps where, who can withdraw and who must share responsibility. That gives a cinematographer a story to tell through distance between bodies and through what can be seen from inside the refuge. The award for images alongside the feature prize invites attention to that spatial problem. A group can call itself a family, but the frame has to make its shifting closeness and strain legible. For this film, the politics of belonging are not only outside the house in a hostile social climate. They are also tested by the daily arrangement of people within it.

Two kinds of authorship, one programme

In a Cannes interview, Sehiri says her film grew partly from frustration with the way migrants from several African countries are grouped together under a single label in Tunisia. The Gaza festival's opening also marked the launch of a cinema academy and showed films developed through its training programme. These are distinct initiatives, but together they put authorship alongside the stories being told. Sehiri also says she cast a professional actor as Marie after considering a real pastor, seeking freedom to make the character more complex.

Sehiri's stated concern helps explain why her three adult characters need separate desires, even while sharing one address. A pastor, a mother and a student cannot stand in for a single anonymous category without losing the tensions that give their alliance meaning. Abu Salah's short poses a related question from another place: who gets to decide which remains of a family life become the image others remember? The two award tracks are not interchangeable. One works through fictional cohabitation, the other through a filmmaker's personal traces. Placing both within a festival led by women makes the act of shaping the image part of the news. The academy extends that act to future makers, while the prizes keep attention on completed films and the choices already visible in their conception. That casting decision is a useful check on the easy claim that authenticity simply means putting a real person in front of a camera. A fictional character can protect the freedom to be imperfect, particularly when a public religious role carries expectations of exemplary conduct. The film's domestic tension can then belong to individual women rather than to a lesson imposed on them from outside.