*A crucial note: this is a time when mutual aid efforts are massively important and this should not detract from that by any means. Please ensure you prioritize assisting Gaza emergency fundraisers that are saving lives by helping people get out. No one wants to leave their home in ruins only to be refugee elsewhere and unlikely to ever be able to return, so these are genuinely emergency, final option fundraisers that really need support.*

*Another important note: 100 percent of any proceeds from this fundraiser will go to Palestinian filmmakers and journalists, primarily those living in Gaza, the West Bank, and '48, though diaspora as well wherever reporting needs demand it. Updates on our various channels will highlight this financial transparency throughout the process.*

What happened:

In October 2023, a TV channel I had spent months negotiating potential projects with reached out to me to ask for me to develop a story on Palestine, as a project I'd pitched with colleagues there had nearly been greenlit weeks earlier, and they wanted to revisit in the context of the unfolding genocide. We decided the first story was too sensitive and sought a new one, securing access to an incredibly powerful and underreported story happening in '48 about the draconian censorship and arrests taking place for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. We arranged the team, found a young and passionate director who was ready to arrange the risky but important story, and then the project was rejected. But our access and team remains. We pitched a few other places with no success.

This wasn't the first time we experienced this with Palestine-related films. The story that we'd been prepping in August and September 2023 began to unfold while we were still in talks with the channel, so we began filming. We filmed several days and had to enlist the help of a Gazan director, and the channel refused to cover his time. That project was about a young family separated by arbitrary ID differences that forced them to move abroad to be together, and the emotional toll it has on both the parents and their families back home. The father is from Gaza and many of his family members were killed in October, including several young children. Without funding, despite grant applications and pitches, that project has also failed to move forward.

Palestine has long been treated as a topic too sensitive to touch. Palestinian films largely get funding through Arab funds, and western journalism outlets rarely pursue complex reporting on the region that accurately explores the violence and power dynamics. As a result of this instinct, stories about Palestine are routinely killed by western funders and there is a massive amount of reporting that goes untold.

What we want to do:

These funds will go toward supporting three films:

Depending on how much we raise, we can build out these projects even further, even potentially supporting a series that can explore unreported stories in Gaza and across the entire region. There are so many stories that still go untold.

Backstory on why we're looking to mutual aid and fundraising as a way to tell these stories:

In 2021, during the Unity Intifada, The Guardian contacted me cold and asked me to make a short documentary about what was happening. I arranged access with a colleague to a complex story about police abuse of protestors , and the minute we finished the edit, the outlet killed the story. We tried pitching it elsewhere, and it was killed again. It took us another two years to finish that project and ultimately decided to self-publish via our own platform.

In the time since, news outlets have massively cut their budgets and closed their video sections. Short documentaries in the news world are borderline unfundable, and grants are so slow that it's impossible to build a newsy project around them. The situation facing journalism is darker than it's ever been, but crowd-funding and mutual aid is an important measure that will allow people to support the reporting they want to see more.

Entropy Journal is the product of these experiences, our platform for stories that don't fit nicely into pitches for large outlets. Along with colleagues in Palestine, Peru, the U.S., Europe, and more, we launched a collective, worker-owned digital outlet that seeks to publish independent films and print reporting. One of our core ideas has been to build a culture of audience support and direct buy in, allowing for a community-led reporting model that gets us away from depending on advertising, subscriptions, grant and foundation support, and state funding. This has been a core idea for our outlet well before October 7, and in the time since the urgency for good reporting has only increased—even though emergency funds are absolutely needed for aid and similar efforts first and foremost.

How the funds will be used:

For all three of these projects, more funding means we will be able to expand the reporting, production days, and post-production for all three of these projects.