The tent is patched with tarpaulin and lit by a single wire bulb that flickers like a warning. Outside, the wind carries the sound of drones. Inside, Ayat adjusts a bridal veil. Her fingers move quickly, precisely—glitter here, contour there. There’s no electricity, but she has a client. Her voice, calm but charged with conviction, cuts through the noise: “It’s not just about looking pretty.”
She’s thirty. She lives in Gaza. She rebuilt her beauty salon from a tent, after the war left her old one in ruins. The only thing that survived was a wedding dress.
What she doesn’t say—but what the camera shows—is perhaps more revealing: it’s about not disappearing.
That phrase could be a tagline for the project itself—a constellation of short films and line-animated testimonies curated by Palestinian journalist and storyteller Tala Al-Sharif. Since 2018, her work has traced an alternative archive: stories of women, told by women, rendered not as symbols or statistics but as fully textured lives.
In much of the news landscape, Palestinian women only appear when something bad happens to them. Female Chimeras shifts the frame—toward what they do, what they imagine, how they live.
It’s a deceptively simple distinction, but a radical one. It’s the shift from subject to agent, from being gazed at to returning the gaze. From being narrated, to narrating oneself.
The platform was born in Hebron, a city known for its conservatism and deep-rooted patriarchal structures. Early on, most women declined to speak. But that changed when it became clear this wasn’t a traditional interview setup. The women weren’t sources; they were collaborators.
The name chimera refers to a hybrid creature—part lion, part serpent, part goat. But Tala reclaims it with new symbolic force: as a metaphor for Palestinian women’s cultural hybridity, multitasking roles, and quiet power in all fields of life. “It’s a life-changing experience,” she explains, “for women who challenge society’s gaze and create something new. A hybrid culture. A powerful presence.”
The films themselves are quiet revolutions. There are no soaring soundtracks, no tidy resolutions. Just lives: a mother harvesting olives; a teenager resisting a forced marriage; a seamstress measuring fabric in the ruins of her bombed house. One woman runs a greenhouse on the border. Another bakes cakes in prison from scraps of yogurt and oil.
They are not extraordinary in the cinematic sense. There are no grand arcs or moral takeaways. That’s precisely the point. These stories insist on the dignity of the ordinary.
There’s a theory in feminist film criticism called the female gaze. It proposes a counter to the dominant, masculinized way of seeing that frames women as passive, decorative, objectified. The female gaze asks instead: what does it mean to look with empathy, with ethics, with care? Female Chimeras is its documentary incarnation. Not just in form, but in process.
“If a woman doesn’t want to show her face or her name, we adapt,” Tala explains. “The story itself is the most important thing.”
That’s how the line-animated stories emerged—hand-drawn films for testimonies too sensitive to show. One of them, narrated by a former prisoner, conjures an entire sensory world through voice and illustration. It’s not anonymity—it’s protection. And narrative power.
“These aren’t just stories,” Tala says. “They’re a form of oral history. They’re archives.”
Since the war on Gaza began in 2023, Female Chimeras has pivoted quickly and urgently. With movement between West Bank cities now severely restricted—journeys that once took an hour now stretch to six due to more than 800 military checkpoints—Tala relies on a dispersed network of freelancers across Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. The result is an improvisational newsroom held together by trust and the belief that telling a story can be an act of political survival.
“We’re talking about human experience,” she says. “Basic rights. Love, loss, challenge. That touches everyone.”
And people are listening. With EED backing, the platform has garnered over five million views and a growing global audience. English subtitles, she explains, are crucial: “We want the stories to reach more people. It’s not only local now.”
But the stories themselves haven’t lost their intimacy. They are full of humour, ritual, scent, and food. A woman making maqluba while her roof leaks. A teenage mechanic adjusting her hijab while fixing a tire. In one film, a midwife prepares for home visits with quiet routine, her gestures confident, deliberate—echoes of care passed through generations.
What these women share is not victimhood, but agency. They do not wait to be saved. They save themselves, and each other. They create space, literally and metaphorically, for a different kind of future.
The future, too, is expanding. Tala dreams of building Female Chimeras into a regional platform—one where Arab women, wherever they live, can share their stories across borders. “We have so many stereotypes,” she has said. “We need a place where our stories can speak to each other—and to the world.” A global Chimera, multilingual and many-voiced, where no woman is reduced to a single role.
She avoids calling her protagonists heroes. “Because when people hear ‘hero,’ they often assume someone who can endure anything, who’s capable of everything—even when they shouldn’t have to be,” Tala says. “But we’re not here to romanticize suffering. We’re showing the pain, the loss, the impossible choices… and still, these women continue to resist, to create, to live.”
Asked who her own hero is, she names her mother—a counsellor who introduced her to women with stories to tell. “She gave me all this way of thinking,” Tala says. “To see opportunities when there are none.”
And if she had a superpower?
“I insist on everything,” she says. “And I listen.”
This article reflects the views of the grantees featured and does not necessarily represent the official opinion of the EED.
