Faye Tzanetoulakou interviews Carol Sansour, a Palestinian poet and cultural producer from Jerusalem currently based in Athens as the Onassis AiR fellow for 2024/2025. Sansour is the director of the Athens Palestine Film Festival whose third edition took place in October and November of 2024.
Faye Tzanetoulakou: Please tell us about the theme of this year's Palestinian Film Festival in Athens and about its importance at this time of ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Carol Sansour: The Athens Palestine Film Festival, now in its third edition, serves as an essential platform for amplifying Palestinian voices at a time when they are often silenced in mainstream media and excluded from official narratives. By showcasing compelling Palestinian cinema in Athens and throughout Greece, the festival disrupts the silence surrounding Palestine and offers a powerful counter-narrative to the biased portrayals in media and political discourse. The festival creates a vital space for truth to emerge, enabling Palestinians to share their stories and reclaim their identities. This is crucial for confronting the harsh realities of occupation and displacement, and for fostering solidarity and awareness amidst deliberate distortion. More than just a cultural event, the Athens Palestine Film Festival is a vital tool in preserving and amplifying the Palestinian struggle for justice.
Athens Palestine Film Festival, 2024.
FT: How do you transform these 75 years of persecution of the Palestinian people into art?
CS: Art gives voice to the pain, hope, and violence of the world, transcending statistics and politics. The suffering of the Palestinian people is not just data—it’s the lived experience of individuals, each with a story of loss, exile, and longing. Art shatters indifference, revealing our shared humanity beyond suffering. Palestinians must tell their own story, and when they do, it demands recognition and justice. Whether through film, poetry, or painting, Palestinian art refuses to be silenced. It opens hearts, making others feel what they have never known and compelling them to confront injustice. Art changes the world by speaking to the humanity in all of us, calling for solidarity, justice, and a future for those unseen and unheard.
FT: What feelings does the necropolitics of the West, that acquiesce in such destruction, evoke? And what do you think is needed to change this attitude?
CS: This necropolitics evokes not only anger but deep grief. The silence and indifference erode our collective soul. It’s not only Palestinians who are erased—it’s our shared humanity. This is a crime. We cannot look away, nor accept that this violence is justified.
A radical confrontation with the truth is necessary. The systems in place are built on lies and human rights denial. Sorrow is not enough—we must act. Justice must be a reality, not an abstract concept. Through protest, solidarity, art, and resistance, we must make this undeniable. Staying put while genocide is unfolding makes us all complicit in the destruction of humanity itself.
FT: Palestine has acquired the symbolic meaning of resistance to all kinds of oppression. It has become a sense of confrontation with ourselves in the West. With the hope that Israel's aggression will stop, and the state of Palestine will be increasingly recognized, what do you think the future holds for your country?
CS: The road ahead will undoubtedly be long and difficult, and I believe we will not be able to walk it alone. The weight of history, the deep scars of oppression, and the vast challenges of rebuilding demand not only resilience but solidarity. I often find myself reflecting on a powerful truth: if the world could allow itself to imagine and actively work toward the creation of a Jewish state after the devastation of World War II, then it is not just a moral responsibility but a duty for the world to now imagine and invest in the building of a free, stable Palestine. This is not about charity or favor—it is about justice, responsibility, and human dignity. For decades, the Palestinian people have endured the brutal consequences of displacement, occupation, and erasure. Now, it is time for the world to stand up, to match its words with actions, and to ensure that the same efforts made to secure one person's future are directed toward securing a just future for another. The struggle for Palestine is not isolated—it is a universal fight for the right to live in dignity, with justice and freedom.
FT: What are your next plans and what is your vision for Freedom?
CS: For me, freedom is about living with integrity, being true to oneself, and daring to step outside the confines of a world that often demands conformity. It is about having the courage to reject the life of a passive bystander, the one who simply follows along without questioning. Freedom is the ability to dream—to dream big, to imagine a life that isn’t shaped by fear or limitation. It’s living without expectation and oppression, allowing yourself to be fully, unapologetically you. True freedom is probably about being at peace within yourself, living your own path, and understanding that your liberation is tied to the liberation of others. It’s a little bit of a dreamer’s vision, yes, but it’s the kind of dream that’s worth striving for—a life of oneness with self and others, where we no longer have to shrink, conform, or live in fear of being who we are. To be free is to dare to live, and to live in full.
My plan? Maybe to remain open, to remain active, and to stay true to the struggle for freedom and justice, in whatever form it takes.
