Mohanad Yaqubi

OFF FRAME AKA REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY
A film by Mohanad Yaqubi

in collaboration with la lumière collective
with filmmaker in attendance

“Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory” is a meditation on the Palestinian people’s struggle to produce an image and self-representation on their own terms in the 1960s and 1970s, with the establishment of the Palestine Film Unit as part of the PLO. Unearthing films stored in archives across the world after an unprecedented research and access, the film begins with popular representations of modern Palestine and traces the works of militant filmmakers in reclaiming image and narrative through revolutionary and militant cinema. In resurrecting a forgotten memory of struggle, “Off Frame” reanimates what is within the frame, but also weaves a critical reflection by looking for what is outside it, or what is off frame.

The Archives of Anticolonialism project explores artistic practices that revitalize forgotten, forbidden, and ignored film archives related to the fight against colonial rule and the afterlife of the independence movements in the former Third World. Through artworks that assemble and mobilize materials once constitutive to anti-colonial struggles across the globe, the series aims to provide new perspectives on the possibilities through which cinema and media could contribute to political struggles as well as on today’s postcolonial condition in the wake of the failures, hopes, and desires mobilized by those endeavors. The project aims at creating a space where cultural workers present, discuss, and exchange experiences about their practices. Accordingly, it will explore the potentialities of a number of research initiatives and archival practices, so as to discuss their ability to nurture new political imaginaries, at same time renegotiating the legacies of the past and providing different horizons for the future.

This series is part of The Political Imaginaries of Media, a year-long project conceived as a series of workshops, screenings, and lectures organized by a collective of researchers, artists, and curators gathered around la lumière collective, Concordia University’s Global Emergent Media Lab, and Feminist Media Studio. It aims to foster the exchange of ideas about grassroots, non-commercial and emancipatory practices using media as instruments of mobilization, empowerment, and community building. As an effort to counter the intensified reconfigurations of media landscape according to neoliberal logics, the project advocates forms of media cultures accessible to everyone and simultaneously invests in reimagining alternative media formations. PIM is curated by Giuseppe Fidotta, Sima Kokotovic, and Sanaz Sohrabi.