We Choose Hope

This is maybe the third time that we sit down to write a newsletter, only to find ourselves in a race with history, overtaken by changes as drastic as unexpected. Our region and the world at large are changing at a dizzying pace.

In Palestine, Gaza has been all but completely destroyed. Israel has killed some 44,000 Palestinian civilians (some estimates put the figure at 200,000), including 30,000 women and children. The human catastrophe unfolding there is beyond comprehension, the ethnic cleansing continues, and the war machine marches on with impunity.

In Lebanon, entire villages have been leveled to the ground by aerial bombardment or, in the south, by Israeli army bulldozers and mines. Some 4,000 civilians have lost their lives, and despite a fragile ceasefire, the destruction of villages in southern Lebanon continues unabated.

In the United States, Donald Trump was elected president and will take office on January 20, 2025, marking a potential turning point in world politics.

While all of this is happening, our hearts must also contain the immensity of the pain in Sudan, which has been recently declared the worst humanitarian crisis ever recorded, affecting over 30 million people.

Finally, in Syria, the dictatorship in place since 1971 collapsed overnight, leaving behind a battered, destroyed, and devastated country. The overcrowded prisons that have seen the light for the first time in a long time reveal horrors that can leave no one with any semblance of humanity unshaken. Despite the wounds and fears, the joy that has invaded the streets of Syria and the world, and the feeds of our social media, is unprecedented.

All this will inevitably shake up our lives, our work, our reality, and AFLAMUNA’s humble contribution of supporting a free independent Arab cinema, within reach of its audience, lifting up those who dare to look ahead.

We come to the end of this year with immeasurable grief, but with more freedom, staring at a possibility we can seize and nurture to build a future where justice and dignity triumph. Fear and anger, but also joy, are in the eyes of those around us. 

We persist in hope. 

Hope that one day, genocides, dictatorships, and colonialism will no longer be contested realities, but recognized facts, and that a just world will become a tangible reality.

Hope that one day, people will experience the freedom they desire and deserve, from the ocean to the gulf, and from the river to the sea.

For, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once said:

We love life whenever we can. 

We steal a thread from a silkworm to weave a sky and a fence for our journey.

We open the garden gate for the jasmine to walk into the street as a beautiful day.

We love life whenever we can.