Description

Gabrielle Martin chats with Bilal Alkhatib about Khalil Khalil, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 23-25 at the Nest in Vancouver, BC.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Bilal discuss: 

• How did you translate the story into movement and performance?
• How did the project start, as your first theatre project coming from film?
• What kind of conversations or tensions shaped the balance between personal and formal approaches?
• How did the interplay between mediums shape the audience's understanding of grief and becoming?
• What responsibilities did you feel as an outsider to Khalil's interior experience, but also in relationship to his political reality?
• What is the difference between the film and the play, and why have both?
• What's next for you?

About Khalil Khalil

How does a name shape a destiny?

Khalil Albatran was named for his brother, a martyr of the First Palestinian Intifada. In a family where the name carries both honour and grief, he has lived as a continuation of another life—one that ended before his began.

Through movement and music, Khalil Khalil becomes a dialogue between presence and absence. The artist places his body in direct conversation with memory, confronting what it means to live as both an echo and an original. Each movement negotiates the distance between what is remembered and what is alive now.

Beyond one man's story, the work opens a window onto a shared experience for many who bear the names of the fallen. A performance in which the artist confronts an existential question: can a body exist beyond the history it inherits?

About Bilal

Bilal Alkhatib is a Palestinian filmmaker. He holds a bachelor's degree in media and television and began his career in film as a cinematographer. Bilal has written and directed several documentary and short films, including Palestine 87 (2022), which was selected for the International Competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and received the Audience Award. His latest documentary project, My Name is Khalil, received grants from the Qattan Foundation and the British Consulate. He is currently developing his first feature film while pursuing a master's degree in cinema.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Bilal Alkhatib joined the conversation from Ramallah, in the West Bank of occupied Palestine.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript