In 2012, a UN report asked: “Gaza in 2020, A Liveable Place?” It established that 90% of the water was unfit for drinking and expected the aquifer to be unusable by 2016, while water’s contamination by salinization and sewage would prove irreversible by 2020 (UNCT 2012, 3). While food aid dependency, unemployment, as well as the lack of access to basic services and medical supplies all point to a humanitarian crisis, there seems to be little place left for such “frivolous” concerns as cinema. Yet, maybe surprisingly, Gaza has been home to several film festivals since the mid-2000s. This presentation argues that Gazan film festivals inhabit the humanitarian present by carving out a metaphorical and material “humanitarian space.” It examines how multi-directional efforts, including by Palestinian film practitioners themselves, utilize the construction of emergency, humanitarian management, and economies of aid to revive a film culture in Gaza. Here I discuss the independent film festivals organized by the Palestinian film community, with a focus on the Red Carpet Karama Human Rights Film Festivals first established in the rubbles of the 2014 war. I use the image of the humanitarian space as a tool to explain how cinema endeavors inscribe themselves within the logics of humanitarian economies that are predominant in Gaza. I describe the Red Carpet festival as a humanitarian space because of the kind of necessary community relief it provides. More importantly, these festivals emerge from the negotiations between human rights organizations, government interests, aid recipients, as well as the professional and amateur film community in Gaza. The presentation examines the mission and history of the Red Carpet Festival, interviews of the organizers, the pre-constituted network of human rights film festivals in which the festival partakes, its promotional strategies, and the programming as it travels across human rights film festivals in the region. Here I establish that the Red Carpet involves mobilizing strategies that cross over activist and humanitarian practices, such as the modularization of organizational tools. The presentation thus opens up humanitarian politics of bare life towards a politics of “more life” (Honig 2014) that gives space and necessity to “non-necessary” leisure like cinema.