A Palestinian artist has been waiting nearly a year for permission to enter Canada to tell his own story on a Vancouver stage. Now, that wait could silence The Horse of Jenin for a second time.
The Cultch says the acclaimed solo production, co-presented with Rumble Theatre and scheduled to open October 8, could once again be cancelled because performer Alaa Mohammed Said Shehada’s Temporary Resident Visa remains stuck in security screening.
Shehada grew up in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, and The Horse of Jenin draws from his childhood and experiences as a Palestinian. He now lives in Amsterdam, holds long-term residency in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as well as a British work permit, and has travelled internationally throughout his career.
Getting to Canada has proven considerably more difficult.
Shehada applied for his Canadian visa on August 17, 2025 and completed biometrics in The Hague on September 5. According to The Cultch, he has passed both criminality and eligibility assessments. The remaining security verification has been underway since September, with no timeline provided for its completion.
That delay has already kept the Palestinian artist from a Vancouver stage once.
The Horse of Jenin was originally scheduled to be presented at The Cultch in March, but the production was postponed when Shehada’s visa wasn’t processed in time. The October run was supposed to give Vancouver audiences another opportunity to see the work. With less than two months to go, its fate is once again uncertain.
The Cultch has had to rearrange programming, communicate with ticket holders, process exchanges and refunds and absorb additional operational costs as a result of the uncertainty.
But there is another loss that is harder to quantify. The Horse of Jenin gives a Palestinian artist the opportunity to tell a story about Palestinian life in his own words, on his own terms. As Palestinian stories, art and cultural expression face intense scrutiny internationally, the continued delay means Vancouver audiences may once again lose the opportunity to hear that story directly from the person telling it.
Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan has been pushing the federal government for answers. According to The Cultch, her office has made numerous inquiries with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Ministerial Centre for Members of Parliament and Senators since January. The response has remained essentially the same: Shehada’s application is still undergoing security screening.
“Our request is straightforward,” Kwan said in a statement. “Mr. Shehada and The Cultch cannot keep rescheduling this performance indefinitely.”
Kwan also noted that her office has assisted with urgent Temporary Resident Visa applications for other performing artists and that, in most cases, particularly once biometrics were completed, applications were processed in time for their scheduled performances.
The reason Shehada’s application has remained in security screening for so long has not been made public. Without an explanation from IRCC, it would be speculative to attribute the delay to his Palestinian identity, but the impact is clear: a Palestinian artist has already been prevented from presenting his work in Vancouver once and, nearly a year after applying to enter Canada, he still doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to do so the second time around.
