″Screening organized within the framework of the Artists of Hope: Supporting Gaza's Puppeteers campaign - UNIMA International″
In Gaza, amidst profound devastation, puppeteers and artists continue to create—holding on to stories, memories, and the possibility of hope through their work.
Artists of Hope is an international solidarity campaign initiated by UNIMA International to support puppeteers and artists based in Gaza who continue their artistic practice under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Working together with THEMAA, UNIMA International has developed different forms of support—from assisting with applications for rescue and evacuation programs, amplifying fundraising campaigns, and providing online training, to creating opportunities for the international puppetry community to stand alongside artists in Gaza.
One part of this initiative focuses on Mahdi Karira, a puppeteer from Gaza, whose life and artistic practice have been documented through three films made between 2024 and 2025. With the support of the filmmakers, directors, and producers, these films are now being shared internationally through solidarity screenings, with the screenings becoming a way to raise funds and direct support to Mahdi.
By bringing these films to PESTA BONEKA, we invite our audience not only to encounter the work and story of a fellow puppeteer, but also to recognize the human being behind the work—the persistence of an artist continuing to create when the conditions for making art, and for everyday life itself, have been profoundly disrupted.
For a festival built upon encounters between puppeteers from different parts of the world, Artists of Hope reminds us that our connections as artists do not end when the performance ends.
Sometimes solidarity begins simply by paying attention: by watching, listening, remembering, sharing, and choosing not to look away.
Through this special screening, PESTA BONEKA joins the international puppetry community in standing with Mahdi Karira and puppeteers in Gaza, and in helping their stories, their work, and their voices continue to travel.
FILM LIST :
We Truly Deserve Life!
directed by Catherine Gignac;
Duration: 9'30
Context
The performance took place on August 7, 2025, during an event entitled Float to Gaza, organized by the Floating Castle Festival in support of Gaza. In this performance, international artists gathered at Sneznik Castle (Stari trg pri Ložu, Slovenia) and joined artists from Gaza via a live stream to present co-creations. The entire performance was projected onto the castle in front of a large audience. Catherine Gignac was on site, in front of the castle, to perform the live sand drawing while Mahdi told his story live from Gaza via video conference.
Credits
Story told live from Gaza: Mahdi Karira
Live translation at the castle: Husam Abed
Live sand drawing at the castle: Catherine Gignac
Live music from Gaza: Ahmad Mueen
Catherine Gignac
Catherine Gignac is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual and performance arts. She creates sand theatre performances, a rare form of expression in which she draws live with sand on a light table, guided by music. Her drawings come to life and transform before the audience's eyes in a wordless, universal visual language. Catherine studied Fine Arts at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (Canada) and in Florence (Italy), as well as French literature at McGill University. Her latest show, Ballet des Ombres (2025), is a wordless piece that unfolds like a visual poem, projected live on a large screen. This is her first full-length solo performance. She previously created Rêve de sable, a short sand theatre piece (2024). She can also be seen at work in Jocelyn Sioui's Frétillant et agile (2023).
Learn more: https://www.art-catherine.com/
Everything That Is
directed by Shourideh C. Molavi;
Duration: 20 min.
Logline
Mahdi Karira, Gaza’s singular puppet maker, transforms the rubble of war into puppets, offering a profound reflection on the role of art amid genocide.
Synopsis
Mahdi Karira, the most experienced puppet master in the occupied Gaza Strip, guides his audience through Gaza’s devastated streets as he turns grey, lifeless rubble—often bearing traces of destroyed Palestinian homes and bodies—into living characters. Using remnants of war—such as cans, wood, and fragments of bombed family homes—Mahdi creates puppets and dolls for performances in displaced persons’ camps, bringing moments of joy to those enduring Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocidal warfare in Gaza.
While his own family lives in a tent alongside his puppets, Mahdi shares his refl ections on art, displacement, poetry, and survival in times of genocide. The fi lm combines his narrative with original footage shot by the director inside Gaza, portraying the daily, systematically engineered colonial landscape. These images are accompanied by previously unpublished poems by Gazan poet Jawad Al-Aqqad.
Together, these elements document the urgent, ongoing work of a generation of Palestinian artists in Gaza, striving to represent their communities beyond the colonial and humanitarian lens of suffering and displacement.
Biographies of the Filmmakers
Shourideh C. Molavi – Director & Producer
Shourideh C. Molavi is a visual artist, scholar, and practitioner based between New York City, Stockholm, and Palestine. She serves as Senior Lecturer at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. For over a decade, she has also worked as the dedicated Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture, connecting their investigations with the work of civil society, artists, grassroots movements, filmmakers, and human rights defenders.
Her career spans more than twenty years of academic, legal, and field research in Palestine/Israel, focused on human and minority rights, particularly the relationship between law, violence, and power—all of which inform her urgent artistic documentation of human relations and creative resistance.
Shurouq Alaila – Footage Shurouq
Alaila is a Palestinian journalist, producer, and researcher reporting from the Gaza Strip. After her husband, Roshdi Sarraj—co-founder of the production company Ain Media—was killed in the ongoing war, she assumed leadership of the company. Despite repeated displacement, she continues to document the war’s devastating impact on Gaza’s civilians.
Laura Poitras – Executive Producer
Laura Poitras is an Academy Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning filmmaker and journalist. Her latest film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, premiered in competition at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion for Best Film—the second documentary ever to receive this honor. It was nominated for both an Academy Award and a BAFTA, and won an Independent Spirit Award.
Her film CITIZENFOUR won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, as well as BAFTA and DGA awards. Poitras’s reporting on the NSA’s global mass surveillance programs earned the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting.
Her earlier film My Country, My Country, the fi rst in her Post-9/11 Trilogy, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Poitras is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Henry Plavidal – Editor & Producer
Henry Plavidal is a New York– and Paris–based editor, producer, and screenwriter. A relative newcomer to the industry, he is currently co-writing and co-producing a film with the producer of The Green Knight (2021) and A Ghost Story (2017).
The Awakening
directed by Mahdi Karira.
The project
From Ground Zero is a compilation of 22 short fi lms made in Gaza. Initiated by Palestinian fi lmmaker Rashid Masharawi, this project was created to give a voice to 22 Gazan artists to tell stories of the ongoing war.
The Ground Zero project was launched by Rashid Masharawi, a Palestinian fi lmmaker from Gaza, during the war that erupted after the attacks of October 7, 2023. This project arose from the observation that the voices of Gazans are rarely heard, that it is essential to have records of lived experiences to preserve memory, and that the history of the occupation of Palestine cannot be rewritten without taking into account the experiences of Palestinians, particularly those of Gaza.
In this context, it is not easy to imagine a thriving creative space, yet it exists. The Gaza Strip has its artistic talents, which nothing should prevent from fl ourishing. This is how the idea of composing a 112-minute fi lm from about twenty very short stories, averaging three minutes each, was born. This allows for a multiplicity of perspectives, ensures the feasibility of fi lming, which is necessarily short and scattered throughout the Gaza Strip, and illustrates creative fertility by borrowing from different genres: fi ction, documentary, docudrama, animation, and even experimental fi lm. The fi lm From Ground Zero concludes with The Awakening, Mahdi's short fi lm.
Selections and Awards
The film was shortlisted to represent Palestine at the 97th Academy Awards in December but was not nominated. The 77th Cannes Film Festival had planned to screen it, but it was ultimately rejected for political reasons. Masharawi screened the fi lm outdoors in protest. The world premiere took place on July 5, 2024, at the fi fth Amman International Film Festival, followed by screenings in mid-July at the 70th Taormina International Film Festival, on September 9 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and on September 28 at the 17th Toronto International Palestinian Film Festival.
Other festivals that have screened From Ground Zero include the Cairo International Film Festival; the Valencia Mediterranean Film Festival (October 2024); and the Antenna Documentary Film Festival in Sydney in February 2025.
Synopsis of The Awakening, a short fi lm by Mahdi Karira
Amid the devastation in Gaza, director Mahdi Karira weaves a haunting story using puppets, intertwining fragments of memory, war, and survival. Sabaya / The Awakening unfolds the story of Abu Al-Majd, a man who lost his memory during the 2014 war. Nearly a decade later, as new waves of bombing strike in 2023, the trauma brutally brings him back to consciousness. To his shock, he discovers he has a wife and son he doesn't remember.
As his memories slowly resurface, his wife recounts their life under siege: years of displacement, loss, and resilience, from 2014 to 2024. Unable to reconcile himself with this harsh reality, Abu Al-Majd begs for the solace of oblivion. But while he longs to erase
the pain, his family insists on remembering: memory, they say, is their homeland's last refuge.
Sabaya / The Awakening is a poetic exploration of the consequences of war on identity and family, where the struggle to forget clashes with the duty to remember. Through puppetry and allegory, the fi lm addresses a universal question: when reality becomes unbearable, is memory a burden or the only thread that keeps us alive?
The Production Team:
Rashid Masharawi
Rashid Masharawi is a renowned Palestinian fi lmmaker whose fi lms, which ironically depict daily life in Palestine, have won numerous awards and been screened at many international and Arab fi lm festivals for decades. In 1996, he founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Center in Ramallah to train young Palestinian fi lmmakers and develop Palestinian cinema. More recently, he founded the Masharawi Fund for Gaza Films and Filmmakers, which currently supports over twenty fi lmmakers in Gaza, notably through the Ground Zero project.
Laura Nikolov and Coorigines Production
Coorigines Production is a fi lm production company dedicated to promoting intercultural exchange and rarely heard voices. Focused on independent, global cinema, Coorigines seeks to foster cultural dialogue and offer unique perspectives through its fi lms. Founded in 2023, the company draws its identity from the diverse background of its founder, Laura Nikolov, who studied history and fi lm in Paris. Her previous roles, including director of an Alliance Française and consultant for fi lm festivals, enrich Coorigines' vision and approach. Notable projects include collaborations with fi lmmakers Rashid Masharawi and Denis Gheerbrant, and most recently, the project From Ground Zero, a collection of 22 short fi lms shot in Gaza in 2024. Committed to cultural and artistic diversity, Coorigines Production actively participates in numerous international festivals, including Cannes and TIFF, where its projects have received awards. Currently, the company is developing several projects, both documentaries and feature-length fi ction fi lms, which explore the thoughts and perspectives of people from around the world, including the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.
Michael Moore, Executive Producer
The fi lm is championed by Michael Moore as executive producer: “These fi lmmakers have accomplished a cinematic miracle. They have created a brilliant fi lm amidst what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have now declared to be genocide.”
