A conversation with the director following the screening of the film The Voice of Hind Rajab. April 29 at 9 PM at Teatro Astoria.ng of 29 Aprile ore 21 Teatro Astoria
The screening of the film The Voice of Hind Rajab rises as a moment of collective testimony and civic responsibility, transforming the act of viewing into an exercise of essential remembrance that Ennesimo Film Festival chooses to rescue from silence. Within this furrow of urgency and dignity lies the presence of Aesha Balaha, a Palestinian filmmaker and the inaugural protagonist of the Not At Home Film Residency, a project born from the synergy between Ennesimo, Piattaforma Lago, and Lago Film Fest. The residency stands as an act of cultural courage, a protected space where the Festival becomes a guardian and an incubator for expressive freedom, offering sanctuary to gazes and narratives that instability and destruction threaten to erase. Within this ecosystem of care and resistance, Aesha Balaha — whose documentary poetics explore the boundaries between identity and diaspora — develops a sensitive inquiry into the suspended condition of those inhabiting the space between two places. Through a contemplative language of silence and everyday fragments, her gaze transforms nostalgia into active resilience, restoring a voice to a generation poised between loss and new beginnings.
AESHA BALAHA She is a Palestinian documentary filmmaker currently based in Italy. After earning a degree in Business Administration, she shifted her focus toward visual storytelling and documentary cinema. She has collaborated with Theater Days Productions and various other film initiatives, developing projects that explore memory, identity, and lived experiences within Palestinian and diasporic contexts. Her films have been screened at numerous international festivals, including the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival, Knowmad Short Film Festival, PIFF Paraná International Film Festival, San Diego Arab Film Festival, Nazra Palestine Short Film Festival, and Sarno Film Festival, among others.
