Save Lough Neagh campaign group to host World Justice Day short film screening

The Save Lough Neagh campaign is hosting a showing of Shanshula, which tells the compelling story of Palestinian fishermen and fisherwomen in Gaza, in Ardboe Community Centre at 6.30pm on Thursday, February 20. 

Directed by Palestinian filmmaker and human rights activist Musheir El Farra, the short film follows the Palestinian fishing community’s struggle for survival under Israel’s decades-long blockade and now genocide of the Gaza Strip.

Coastal communities across Ireland and Scotland will host screenings of the documentary simultaneously.

"Shanshula" is local slang for a type of fishing net used in Gaza, a symbol of the enduring spirit of these families despite overwhelming adversity. The film provides a harrowing insight into a community whose lives and livelihoods have been under attack for decades by the Israeli nazy, which lethally enforces restrictions - pitching gunboats against rowing boats. In the three years to September 2023 alone, fisherment in Gaza reported 1135 attacks by the Israeli navy, which killed three fishermen and injured or disabled 65. The film includes interviews with fishermen who have been displaced or disabled, or who have lost loves ones to Israeli navy attacks, and documents the seizure and destruction of boats and fishing equipment. It also tells the story of one of the few Palestinian fisherwomen in the Gaza Strip.

The film was about to be premiered in Gaza in early October 2023. Following Israel’s invasion, it was extended to document the forced evacuation of the fishing community from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip and the suffering of the Palestinian people under the Israeli genocide.

Shanshula was produced in cooperation between Sheffield Palestine solidarity campaign, where El Farra is based, and a Gazan media organisation providing training for youngsters called the Palestinian Vanguard Station, which was bombed and destroyed by Israeli F16s in January 2024.

The international screening is part of a global initiative for World Social Justice Day where Shanshula is being shown in coastal communities worldwide, including Lough Neagh, with the aim of developing a solidarity campaign among fishing communities. Community groups along the Atlantic seaboard and islands from an Daingean, Kerry and north to Árainn Mhór, Donegal, as well as Scotland, will host the screenings simultaneously. 

They will be introduced live online by Musheir El Farra accompanied by some of the fishermen in Gaza, who have returned to their devastated neighbourhood. The screenings are free, with donations invited to a solidarity fund that will be sent directly to the displaced, maimed and bereaved fishing families of Gaza via the Solidarity Campaign in Sheffield.

Free tickets for the Ardboe screening, supported by the Mid Ulster Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Friends of the Earth NI, can be reserved HERE