Founded in 2014, Filmlab: Palestine’s establishment as an organization was inspired by the personal experience of its founders in empowering Palestinian youth in refugee camps in Jordan. Realising that this experience introduced young practitioners to the art of filmmaking as a creative and unconventional method to tell their own personal narratives, Filmlab: Palestine was established to further document the collective Palestinian memory as well as the unique individual voices of Palestinians within the occupied territories and abroad. Their aim is to expand and cultivate the existing cinema culture within Palestine, while providing the much-needed technical and artistic support for emerging Palestinian filmmaking voices.
At Filmlab, they believe in the power of films in society, as they perceive cinema as an important cultural and educational tool can both boost and elevate culture within society. Moreover, cinema plays an important role in forming society’s values, habits, arts, and economy, and can be used as a means for cultural guidance and enlightenment, documenting narratives, and preserving collective memory.
With the slogan “it’s time to tell our stories”, Filmlab is eager to promote Cinema Culture as one of the most integral audio visual tools for the effective use of media, advertising, self-expression, entertainment, available to Palestinian Filmmakers as they tell their own stories, and put Palestine’s name on the map of international cinema.