Athens Palestine Film Festival

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

A seventeenth-century Palestinian pirate queen argues with a nineteenth-century Bethlehem merchant of devotional objects about who owns the things empires carried away. That dialogue sits at the centre of A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, one of the films the Athens Palestine Film Festival brings to Onassis Stegi from 29 to 31 October 2026.

This is the fourth year that Onassis AiR has partnered with the Athens Palestine Film Festival, and the first time the collaboration moves out of the Onassis AiR premises and into Stegi itself. The programme is curated by the festival's director Carol Sansour — a Palestinian poet whose first book, In the Time of the Apricots, appeared in a trilingual edition in 2019, and an Onassis AiR Fellow — together with her team. Over three days it combines screenings, discussions and performances.

The films span three decades. A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, a 30-minute work from 2026 by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, was commissioned by the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam and premiered there. It sets the little-known history of Bethlehem's globally connected merchants against the successive dispossessions from the British Mandate to the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa. Amal Ramsis's You Come From Far Away (2018, 84 minutes) follows the family of Najati Sidqi, a Palestinian communist who went to Spain during the Civil War and wrote about it for Arab and Spanish journals — a war that scattered his children across countries and languages. The closing ceremony screens Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a Disappearance, his first feature, which won Best First Film at the 1996 Venice Film Festival.

The crowd this programme draws treats a screening as the start of a conversation rather than the end of an evening. Some come for Suleiman's first feature on a big screen, some for a museum commission that has barely left Amsterdam, and some because Stegi is where they already go for work that argues with its audience.

The setting is Stegi's Small Stage, a 151-seat room that expands to 200. The vibe is a curated three-day programme mixing screenings with discussions and performances. The sound moves between archival voices, documentary testimony and fiction. The door is ticketed.

If you want a relaxed night at the movies with popcorn and a single feature, this is a curated programme that asks you to stay and talk. But if you want to see the Athens Palestine Film Festival's range — a new museum commission, a documentary about a forgotten corner of the Spanish Civil War, and the debut that put Suleiman on the map — in one building over one weekend, this is it.

Stegi is at 107–109 Syngrou Avenue in Neos Kosmos, a 12-minute walk from Syngrou-Fix metro. Use the pedestrian underpass by Panteion University to cross Syngrou rather than fighting the traffic. Screening times have not been announced yet; tickets go through the Onassis box office. With the Small Stage capped at 200 seats, book early for the closing night.

Three days, one small room, and a limited programme that spans three decades of Palestinian cinema before the festival moves on.