Bilal Safadi

Biography

Bilal Safadi (1997) is a filmmaker from Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, born in Damascus to a Syrian mother from Sweida and a father from the occupied Golan Heights. He graduated from the Film & Television Department at Tel Aviv University and completed a professional photography diploma at the Technion. His work draws on personal memory and lived experience through restrained narratives and a visually driven cinematic language. Drawn to emotional tension and quiet intensity, he creates films where atmosphere, silence, and gesture carry as much weight as plot, treating cinema as a space where emotion can exist without excess. For over fifteen years, Safadi has worked across directing, cinematography, editing, art direction, and sound, contributing to numerous student films and documentary projects, including works later broadcast on Al Jazeera. He also has a background in acting and theatre, having performed in acclaimed stage productions across Israeli and Palestinian cities. His debut short film, 67 Hours, and graduation project at Tel Aviv University, based on the real story of his mother’s attempt to cross into Syria for her father’s funeral, explores themes of borders, grief, and suspended belonging. The film was presented at the Short Film Corner of the Cannes Film Festival. He was recently selected to participate in the T-Port Talent Bridge program at the Cannes Film Festival, where he began developing his first feature film, Far' Falastin (235). The project was subsequently selected for the Doha Film Institute Feature Script Lab 2026 and the Film Talent Academy First Feature Lab at the Linz International Short Film Festival 2026.