TO GAZA, WITH LOVE: A Global Anijam - Puerto Rico Con Palestina

Sharing a short film I made for the Animation Community 4 Palestine's (@ac4pal on Instagram) online event TO GAZA, WITH LOVE: A Global Anijam; an initiative to send positive messages to the people of Palestine from animators around the world via 10-30 seconds of animated films.

A good amount of them can be seen on the @ac4pal IG page. The ones I’ve seen have all been so great and heartfelt. More updates on this event to come.

AC4PAL took inspiration from animator Haneen Koraz (@animator_haneen on IG) along with her team in Gaza who help Palestinian children make stop-motion animated films as a way to express the hardships of the war while maintaining a sense of optimism. The films I’ve seen from them have been heartbreaking, showing how much resilience they have at very young ages. No child should go through what they go through. I’ve always thought the process of animating as a kind of therapy, so I think it’s beautiful and inspiring what Haneen and her team are doing to help these children through that process.

With my film, I wanted to represent that in Puerto Rico (where I’m from) the solidarity towards Palestine is strong, that we acknowledge the oppression and genocide that the Palestinians are going through, letting them know that we care big. Puerto Rico has its long history of colonialism and oppression, and is still going unfortunately, in which many Puerto Ricans have expressed their empathy towards Palestine because of their history. I added a ‘Bomba’ drum beat, a type of music that originated in Puerto Rico that’s used for many different occasions, but mostly known to represent resistance and resilience against colonialism and oppression.

I hope you like my film and thanks for reading 🙂

You can donate to Haneen and her team’s cause in the links below:

GOFUNDME

PATREON

Thanks to the AC4PAL team for putting this all together and making it happen 🙏