The dv_vd series is an initiative of Videographe and Dazibao. This collaboration aims to create a dialogue between the centre's collection and the current video art scene. For this edition, we offered carte blanche to the Regards palestiniens collective, inviting them to develop an original program.
The Missing Image is Gaza brings together six short experimental films and video works that record life in Gaza and in exile through a series of ordinary and extraordinary gestures. Documenting decades of creative survival under the ongoing Nakba in Palestine, the artists and filmmakers practice cinema as a creative force of resistance in the face of the Zionist settler-colonial killing machine. Cooking, talking, journaling, live-streaming, photographing, animating, reenacting, and oral storytelling are among the many aesthetic and political strategies through which Palestinians have been confronting colonial violence since 1948. Bringing attention to moments shaped by enclosure, bombardment, dispossession, and displacement, the works featured in this program foreground ordinary acts as sites of political presence, insisting on life and visibility where they are most violently denied.
This program emerges from—and responds to—ongoing institutional silences and censorship within the cultural and academic fields here in Montreal, marked by a refusal to acknowledge, name, and take action against one of the most urgent and devastating realities of our present: the relentless live-streamed genocide in Gaza.
In addition to an annual screening series, which has been taking place in Montreal since 2007, the collective Regards palestiniens has, since October 7 2023, been actively developing and presenting film programs that center Gaza and foreground the decades-long Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation. These initiatives form part of a sustained effort to counter the systematic erasure of images from Gaza and Palestine more broadly. Across and beyond Montreal, we have curated and organized screenings that insist on Gaza’s presence within cultural and public spaces, including multiple iterations of Gaza: Between Bodies and Images, presented in Montreal and Toronto; the premiere of Gaza: From Ground Zero co-presented with Cinema Politica; Diaries of An Occupation, presented with Hors Champ at the Cinémathèque québécoise; and various programming initiatives held in solidarity with Palestinian liberation at student encampments, among many others. This work has also taken the form of more immediate, site-specific interventions, such as the first iteration of The Missing Image is Gaza, staged as an outdoor screening in the parking lot of Articule gallery, a co-organizer of the event.
Taken together, these actions reflect our ongoing commitment to challenge silence, propaganda, and marginalization by creating spaces for the circulation of diverse Palestinian voices and artistic practices—from Gaza and the diaspora alike. This screening is not an isolated event, but part of a sustained curatorial and political practice dedicated to insisting on Gaza’s visibility, complexity, and presence in the face of systematic attempts by the government, mainstream media, and cultural and academic institutions to suppress or contain it. This commitment is not only discursive but institutional: Regards Palestiniens, Dazibao, and Vidéographe are among a growing number of cultural organizations across so-called Canada adhering to the guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), aligning curatorial practice with political responsibility and tangible action.
By placing Gaza at the center, we affirm that what has been rendered absent by dominant narratives is precisely what must be named and seen: that the missing image is Gaza. In so doing, our program disrupts institutional silence and reclaims cinema as a space of witnessing, collective responsibility, and solidarity.
— Regards palestiniens
Program
Hadeel Asali, Daggit Gazza (2013) — 7 min 26 s
Taysir Batniji, Gaza Diary (2001) — 4 min 46 s
Amal Al-Nakhala, Limitless (2024) — 4 min 39 s
Areej Abu Eid, A Very Hot Summer (2016) — 16 min 43 s
Firas Shehadeh, Final Hour Log - Handala (2025) — 17 min 20 s
Basma al-Sharif, Morning Circle (2025) — 20 min 31 s
Regards palestiniens is a grassroots film collective dedicated to Palestinian cinema and based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal.
Since 2005, we have focused on activating the political potential of aesthetics in Palestinian cinema. We aim to organize and curate screenings as gatherings for cinematic discussion and for raising political consciousness.
We’ve also engaged in direct action, confronting institutional censorship and artwashing in cultural and academic spaces. We continue to educate and organize around the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).