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The 14th annual Witness Palestine Film Festival kicks off this week, building on last year’s momentum.
“We sold over 1,000 tickets to all of our screenings,” says Casey Asprooth-Jackson, a festival producer, of 2024. “Being able to get that many people into our theaters in our city to watch stories from Palestine was kind of a dream for the people who first founded this organization. Many of them thought they would never see a day when this many people would be coming out just to watch films from Palestine.”
WPFF aims to reach an even broader audience this year. It has a dozen showings at six different venues. The works include three countries’ Academy Award selections for Best International Feature this year:
■ “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is a submission from Tunisia which dramatizes the response of Red Crescent volunteers after receiving a phone call from a six-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza.
■ “All That’s Left of You” is a drama directed by the Emmy-nominated Cherien Dabis and illustrates the multigenerational history of a family in the Occupied West Bank through vignettes of significant moments. It is Jordan’s official selection for the Oscars.
■ “Palestine 36” is the festival’s closing film and the selection from Palestine. The film is a historical epic set during the Arab revolt against British colonial rule in Palestine.
In addition to these more traditional films, WPFF will also showcase more experimental and abstract work. The Visual Studies Workshop will host a series of shorts, including a recently discovered selection from the VSW archive.
The Rochester Contemporary Art Center will present “A Bunch of Questions with No Answers”, a film spanning over 23 hours, in six-hour sessions over four consecutive days. The film is a record of questions about the ongoing genocide in Palestine posed by journalists to the U.S. State Department during press briefs between October 2023 and the end of the Biden administration.
On the final day of the film, RoCo will also host an in-person Q&A session with director Robert Ochshorn.
In addition to these new venues for WPFF, the Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House and the Little Theater, which continues to be a mainstay for the festival, will also be stops for filmgoers.
“Our partnership with them today is stronger than ever,” Asprooth-Jackson says of the Little. “We had a sold-out screening that year of the film ‘No Other Land’ on our opening day. They ended up bringing that film back for a theatrical run later, right before it went on to win Best Documentary at the Oscars.”
To him, the importance of the film festival lies in spurring positive action and supporting artistic expression and voice in Palestine. (All money from ticket sales goes to the filmmakers.) It is also important to reemphasize a narrative that has been warped in part by controversy-avoiding sources, in Asprooth-Jackson’s view.
For example, this year’s festival will also show “Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.” The 2025 documentary was first commissioned by the BBC as a forensic investigation into the targeting of medical infrastructure and health care workers in Gaza.
They declined to broadcast it, however, citing concerns about “partiality.” That decision resulted in an open letter penned by over 100 BBC journalists who condemned it as suppression and censorship. The original filmmakers reacquired the rights, and the film is being distributed by media company Zeteo.
The film will be shown at the University of Rochester, an institution that has also been caught up in controversies related to protests in support of Palestine. Student action was rapid and consistent during the 2023-2024 school year, culminating in an encampment.
The following year, a series of “Wanted” posters were put up on campus targeting UR leadership for the school’s alleged ties to the Israeli war effort and settlement movement. In January 2025, four students were suspended from the school and charged with a class D felony. Two months later, another student was suspended for attending unsanctioned pro-Palestinian protests, including one that disrupted the school’s annual Boar’s Head dinner. Already in this 2025-2026 school year, student protestors carried out a 12-day hunger strike, which ended earlier this month.
Asprooth-Jackson says that the UR venue, as well as the content, is important in showing solidarity with groups that might feel abandoned or at odds with power structures.
“It’s very important to us that we partner and continue to support student groups and faculty at UR and other academic institutions so that they don’t feel isolated and alone,” he says. “We want institutions to understand that these are important issues to our community and the Palestinian members of our community.”
“Many institutions in our society, particularly academic institutions, have failed in a historic way in regard to protecting Palestinian students, freedom of thought and discussion of the question of Palestine, and have capitulated to Trump’s threats,” he continues. “I think that’s the most accurate way you could put it.”
Asprooth-Jackson says he often returns to a historic decision by a Rochester giant when explaining his perspective to others.
In 1986, Kodak became the first multinational organization to withdraw from apartheid-era South Africa. This created a domino effect, causing many other American companies to pull out of the country and pressure it to end its racially imbalanced system.
“Rochester played a pivotal role in that story in the success of that campaign because local activists coordinated with other activists around the world to put pressure on Kodak to divest,” Asprooth-Jackson says. “All of that is to say, the question of Palestine may appear to certain people to be intractable, an ancient conflict that’s beyond resolution, or something that isn’t really relevant to them. And I say to them, ‘What would you have wanted to do in 1985 with regard to South Africa?’”
“There were many people in our society who looked the other way,” he continues. “But by 1992, everyone said that ‘Of course South Africa deserves freedom.’ This is the way history shifts, and I’m confident that we will see that shift in our lifetime with regard to Palestine. So what side of history do you want to be on?”
The Witness Palestine Film Festival runs Nov. 15-23. View the schedule here.
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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