Quand
Où
Média
Billets
En présence de
co-présenté par
PROGRAMME
This program focuses on militant cinema’s role in the creation and circulation of revolutionary and anticolonial imaginaries and emancipatory politics, and on how this cinema persists in the form of contemporary and lively archives that resist visual displacement.
Conakry
Filipa Cesar | 2013 | 11 mins
Staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Conakry is a sequence shot on 16mm film that travels through time, space and media to revisit one film reel from the Guinean archive. This particular reel documents an exhibition curated by Amílcar Cabral at the Palais du Peuple in 1972 in Conakry, Guinea, reporting on the state of the war against Portuguese rule. César invited the Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on these images and their history.
Via Dolorosa
Oraib Tukan | 2021 | 21 mins
Footage shot by the late photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawharieh, slowed-down, studied, and re-assembled with material from where it was found—piles of film reels discarded by former Soviet cultural centers in Amman, Jordan, accompanied with commentary by literary and film scholar Nadia Yaqub. Via Dolorosa (Latin for the Arabic ‘Way of Suffering’) is itself a processional route that Jawharieh filmed in his birth city of Jerusalem.
Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory
Mohanad Yaqubi | 2016 | 65 mins
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.
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The screening will be followed by a discussion with Muhammad Nour ElKhairy (filmmaker and video artist) and Fadi AbuNe’meh (PhD candidate in Film and Moving Images studies), moderated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui.
—
The programming of Militant Cinema was finalized prior to Israel’s genocidal besiegement of Gaza which has occurred as yet another episode in the ongoing colonial occupation of Palestine over the past 75 years. We had envisioned this series to contribute to critical and creative usage of film as an emancipatory tool against colonial mindset and aggression: to shed light on how archival erasures can and has orchestrated ethnic cleansing, land dispossession, and fabricated historical amnesia; facilitating the apartheid military state of Israel’s unlawful and criminal activities over the past 75 years. The screening series of Militant Cinema now is happening in a state of historical catastrophe and the images that have been used in the programmed films are eerily echoing their past specters. We aim to use this program as a platform to further contextualize the current genocidal war inflicted against Gazans and other Palestinians in land and in the diaspora, within the larger historical events that these films in the program have brought forward in the light of their disappearance from collective memory and public knowledge.
In light of Israel’s ongoing brutal bombing of Gaza, we have reframed the event as a solidarity fundraiser screening. We encourage you to donate the equivalent of a ticket price ($15 or more if you can) in cash at the door. All the money raised will be sent to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Otherwise please consider donating directly to this organization.
—
The program is part of the Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance screening series curated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui and supported by the Feminist Media Studio. This event is one of multiple solidarity fundraiser screenings titled From the River to the Sea, organized by a coalition of cultural organizations and collectives—including Regards palestiniens, Hors champ, Dhakira Collective, Zoom out, Cinéma du Parc, Cinéma Public, Cinema Politica, Palestinian and Jewish Unity, and Main Film— that are coming together in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians’ struggle for equality, justice and liberation.
BIOGRAPHIES
Filipa Cesar (Porto, 1975). A Berlin-based artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the fictional aspects of documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving images. Her praxis takes media as a means to expand and expose counter narratives of resistance to historicism. Since 2011, César has been looking into the origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau as part of the African Liberation Movement and its imaginaries and cognitive potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda. She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15) both organised by Arsenal—Berlin. Selected film festivals include Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Curtas Vila do Conde; Forum Expanded-Berlinale; IFFR, Rotterdam, and Cinéma du Réel. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: SFMOMA; São Paulo Biennial; Manifesta 8, Cartagena; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstwerke, Berlin; NBK, Berlin; Hordaland Art Center, Bergen; Futura, Prague; Khiasma, Paris; Tensta konsthall, Spånga; Mumok, Vienna; MoMA, New York; Harvard Film Museum, Boston.
Oraib Toukan is an artist and scholar. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine and was visiting faculty at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah. Between 2015 and 2017, she taught at the Ruskin School of Art’s University of Oxford Graduate Teaching program. In Autumn 2018, she was Mercator fellow at the Cultures of Critique program at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Toukan is author of Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the essay-film When Things Occur (2016). Recent exhibitions include the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Mori Art Museum, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Qalandia International, The Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, and the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Toukan’s current research addresses “cruel images” and the question of how to treat them as both object and subject through artistic practice. Her writings have appeared in a number of publications, collected works, and biennale readers. Since 2011, she has been analyzing and remaking works from a found collection of film reels that once belonged to now-dissolved Soviet cultural centers in Jordan in 1990-1991. In the academic year 2019/20, she was a EUME Fellow and stayed at EUME during the academic years 2020-2022, supported by a fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the academic years 2022-24, she continues to be affiliated with EUME.
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production outfits, Idioms Film. He also teaches Film Studies at the International Art Academy in Palestine. Yaqubi is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, that focuses on militant film practices. Yaqubi’s filmography as a producer includes the documentary feature Infiltrators (directed by Khaled Jarrar, 2013), the narrative short Pink Bullet (directed by Ramzi Hazboun), and as co-producer the narrative feature Habibi (directed by Susan Youssef, 2010) and the short narrative Though I Know the River is Dry (directed by Omar R. Hamilton, 2012). In 2013, Yaqubi initiated and produced Suspended Time, an anthology that reflected on 20 years after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, that included nine filmmakers. His latest film No Exit, (written with Omar Kheiry), premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2015. He feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory is making its world premiere at TIFF.
Muhammad Nour Elkhairy. A Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan. ElKhairy holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University. His experimental fiction and non-fiction video works are particularly concerned with the legacies of colonial, political and economic power. Intrinsic to his work is the desire to highlight the screen not only as an ideological apparatus but also as a surface onto which the performed self exists between the interiority of the personal and the exteriority of the sociopolitical. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries.
PROGRAMME
This program focuses on militant cinema’s role in the creation and circulation of revolutionary and anticolonial imaginaries and emancipatory politics, and on how this cinema persists in the form of contemporary and lively archives that resist visual displacement.
Conakry
Filipa Cesar | 2013 | 11 mins
Staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Conakry is a sequence shot on 16mm film that travels through time, space and media to revisit one film reel from the Guinean archive. This particular reel documents an exhibition curated by Amílcar Cabral at the Palais du Peuple in 1972 in Conakry, Guinea, reporting on the state of the war against Portuguese rule. César invited the Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on these images and their history.
Via Dolorosa
Oraib Tukan | 2021 | 21 mins
Footage shot by the late photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawharieh, slowed-down, studied, and re-assembled with material from where it was found—piles of film reels discarded by former Soviet cultural centers in Amman, Jordan, accompanied with commentary by literary and film scholar Nadia Yaqub. Via Dolorosa (Latin for the Arabic ‘Way of Suffering’) is itself a processional route that Jawharieh filmed in his birth city of Jerusalem.
Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory
Mohanad Yaqubi | 2016 | 65 mins
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 screening will be followed by a discussion with Muhammad Nour ElKhairy (filmmaker and video artist) and Fadi AbuNe’meh (PhD candidate in Film and Moving Images studies), moderated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui.
—
The programming of Militant Cinema was finalized prior to Israel’s genocidal besiegement of Gaza which has occurred as yet another episode in the ongoing colonial occupation of Palestine over the past 75 years. We had envisioned this series to contribute to critical and creative usage of film as an emancipatory tool against colonial mindset and aggression: to shed light on how archival erasures can and has orchestrated ethnic cleansing, land dispossession, and fabricated historical amnesia; facilitating the apartheid military state of Israel’s unlawful and criminal activities over the past 75 years. The screening series of Militant Cinema now is happening in a state of historical catastrophe and the images that have been used in the programmed films are eerily echoing their past specters. We aim to use this program as a platform to further contextualize the current genocidal war inflicted against Gazans and other Palestinians in land and in the diaspora, within the larger historical events that these films in the program have brought forward in the light of their disappearance from collective memory and public knowledge.
In light of Israel’s ongoing brutal bombing of Gaza, we have reframed the event as a solidarity fundraiser screening. We encourage you to donate the equivalent of a ticket price ($15 or more if you can) in cash at the door. All the money raised will be sent to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Otherwise please consider donating directly to this organization.
—
The program is part of the Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance screening series curated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui and supported by the Feminist Media Studio. This event is one of multiple solidarity fundraiser screenings titled From the River to the Sea, organized by a coalition of cultural organizations and collectives—including Regards palestiniens, Hors champ, Dhakira Collective, Zoom out, Cinéma du Parc, Cinéma Public, Cinema Politica, Palestinian and Jewish Unity, and Main Film— that are coming together in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians’ struggle for equality, justice and liberation.
BIOGRAPHIES
Filipa Cesar (Porto, 1975). A Berlin-based artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the fictional aspects of documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving images. Her praxis takes media as a means to expand and expose counter narratives of resistance to historicism. Since 2011, César has been looking into the origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau as part of the African Liberation Movement and its imaginaries and cognitive potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda. She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15) both organised by Arsenal—Berlin. Selected film festivals include Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Curtas Vila do Conde; Forum Expanded-Berlinale; IFFR, Rotterdam, and Cinéma du Réel. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: SFMOMA; São Paulo Biennial; Manifesta 8, Cartagena; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstwerke, Berlin; NBK, Berlin; Hordaland Art Center, Bergen; Futura, Prague; Khiasma, Paris; Tensta konsthall, Spånga; Mumok, Vienna; MoMA, New York; Harvard Film Museum, Boston.
Oraib Toukan is an artist and scholar. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine and was visiting faculty at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah. Between 2015 and 2017, she taught at the Ruskin School of Art’s University of Oxford Graduate Teaching program. In Autumn 2018, she was Mercator fellow at the Cultures of Critique program at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Toukan is author of Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the essay-film When Things Occur (2016). Recent exhibitions include the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Mori Art Museum, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Qalandia International, The Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, and the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Toukan’s current research addresses “cruel images” and the question of how to treat them as both object and subject through artistic practice. Her writings have appeared in a number of publications, collected works, and biennale readers. Since 2011, she has been analyzing and remaking works from a found collection of film reels that once belonged to now-dissolved Soviet cultural centers in Jordan in 1990-1991. In the academic year 2019/20, she was a EUME Fellow and stayed at EUME during the academic years 2020-2022, supported by a fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the academic years 2022-24, she continues to be affiliated with EUME.
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production outfits, Idioms Film. He also teaches Film Studies at the International Art Academy in Palestine. Yaqubi is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, that focuses on militant film practices. Yaqubi’s filmography as a producer includes the documentary feature Infiltrators (directed by Khaled Jarrar, 2013), the narrative short Pink Bullet (directed by Ramzi Hazboun), and as co-producer the narrative feature Habibi (directed by Susan Youssef, 2010) and the short narrative Though I Know the River is Dry (directed by Omar R. Hamilton, 2012). In 2013, Yaqubi initiated and produced Suspended Time, an anthology that reflected on 20 years after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, that included nine filmmakers. His latest film No Exit, (written with Omar Kheiry), premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2015. He feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory is making its world premiere at TIFF.
Muhammad Nour Elkhairy. A Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan. ElKhairy holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University. His experimental fiction and non-fiction video works are particularly concerned with the legacies of colonial, political and economic power. Intrinsic to his work is the desire to highlight the screen not only as an ideological apparatus but also as a surface onto which the performed self exists between the interiority of the personal and the exteriority of the sociopolitical. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries.
