Aesha Balaha is a Palestinian short documentary filmmaker currently based in Italy. She holds a degree in Business Administration and later shifted her focus toward visual storytelling and documentary cinema. She has worked with Theater Days Productions and other film initiatives, developing projects that explore memory, identity, and lived experience within Palestinian and diasporic contexts. Her films have been screened at several international festivals, including 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. Recently, she participated in a specialized course on Palestinian cinema and filmmaking organized by MIT in collaboration with Palestinian filmmaker Ahlam Muhtaseb.filmmaker Ahlam Muhtaseb.
The project
During the residency, she will develop a short documentary exploring the experience of living between two places, focusing on Palestinian students who were recently evacuated to Italy to continue their studies — herself among them. The project reflects on questions of identity and belonging, and on how the relationship to place is reshaped when one leaves and begins a new life in a different context. It also examines how memory becomes a parallel space inhabited alongside the present. The film approaches this experience through intimate personal stories that reveal the emotional and psychological shifts accompanying such transitions. Through everyday moments — late-night voice messages from family, video calls across distance, notebooks carrying traces of an unfinished departure, and trains moving through unfamiliar landscapes — the work seeks to capture the tension between anxiety and hope, longing and resilience. Adopting a contemplative visual language, the film moves away from direct narration and instead focuses on silence, light, and subtle gestures as carriers of meaning. The residency will provide space for research and visual experimentation, allowing the narrative structure to evolve around the interplay between memory and the new environment. The project aims to create a sensitive cinematic experience that gives voice to a generation navigating loss and new beginnings.
