Playlist
<p>NOVA 78 resurrects the electrifying atmosphere of the Nova Convention of 1978 through restored, never-before-seen archival footage featuring icons like William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, and Patti Smith—reimagined as a vibrant cinematic event for contemporary audiences .</p>
<p>A film in which two celebrations of life, a wedding in France and a commemoration in Guinea Bissau, are organically intertwined with the threads of a family and heritage that live and travel between these two worlds. Perpetual circular movement framing reality.</p>
<p>The film stages a fictional trial around the 2010 Bangkok massacre, blending witness testimony with the filmmaker’s research. A meditation on truth and justice in the absence of official accountability.</p>
<p>Abandoned houses, surviving objects that carry memory. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, a filmmaker breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons. Grappling with estrangement and loss, she uses fragments, archives, and the images made during her years of diaristic filming in Iran to reflect on the collective taboo, the fear that silenced the population for so many years, and the explosion of resistance that continues to grow within Iranian society today.</p>
<p>Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.</p> <p>produced by the Sharjah Biennial 9</p>
<p>Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a mircrocosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.</p>
<p>Drifting through the streets of former East Berlin neighborhoods, Morning Circle traces the unsteady affective terrain of isolation and displacement, assimilation and oppression. In Basma al-Sharif’s (O, Persecuted, NYFF52) film, the bureaucratic condescension and violence of a residency interview sits alongside domestic scenes featuring a father and his young son. The film uncovers the loss and thrumming tensions of exilic life under Western Europe’s smooth gray surfaces.</p>
<p>A film set in a fictional world where there are no longer adults. The kids live without governance and do what they please.</p>
<p>In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family. Gara, To Hold a Mountain’s guiding light, is living proof that not all heroes wear capes. She spends long days herding sheep, making cheese, and fighting to protect her favorite place in the world — all while ensuring that young Nada grows up kind, capable, and empowered. In To Hold a Mountain, co-directors Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić craft a tender, visually stunning portrait of a remote mountain community of women driven by strenuous work and grassroots resistance. Despite their daily hardships and the lasting effects of generational trauma, they remain loving and dignified, nurturing not only one another, but also the animals they rely on for sustenance. The film powerfully captures the significance of love and persistence at a time when the past haunts and the future feels under attack.</p>
<p>One hundred years after the first flight between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brussels Airlines approaches Collectif Faire-Part with a proposal to show their work on board their flights. Interwoven with archival footage and testimonies of activists and survivors of in-flight violence, the collective’s internal dialogue in What We Said to Brussels Airlines poses a variety of questions and opens up space for critical reflection.</p>
<p>After 100 years of independence, a bold new wave of young Irish artists redefine folk music and reflect over the impact of their colonial history.</p>
<p>Strange images overlap like floating ghosts: a dead body, a singer, an audience. The film shows, paradoxically and theatrically, how death inhabits the León de Greiff Auditorium in Colombia.</p>
<p>Tired of poverty and hunger, 31 young Cape Verdeans, including one woman, embark on an adventure to Cuba in a secret operation to receive military training to free the country from the clutches of colonialism.</p>
<p>We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.</p>
<p>June 2025. During a residency at Baumettes prison, Hassen Ferhani transforms the Image and Movement workshop into a photography studio. Over the course of a collaboratively made film, the studio shelters, liberates and clarifies the dreams and bodies of the men who take part in the game.</p>
<p>It's summer in Paris, and at a youth club in Belleville the young people have an idea: they want to organize a music festival in a park. A fast-paced film where the positive energy comes from within.</p>
<p>“It seems to be the time to consider bridges.” – James Benning</p>
<p>An intimate dialogue with Soha Bechara, ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter, in her Paris dorm room. The interview was taped during the last year of the Israeli occupation, one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation center (South Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years—six in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival, and will, the overexposed image of the survivor speaks quietly and directly to the camera—not speaking of the torture, but of separation amd loss; of what is left behind and what remains.</p>
<p>In 1969, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin were commissioned by the League of Arab States to create a film portraying the struggle for Palestinian liberation. However, months after completing filming, Jordan's armed forces attacked the Palestinian resistance base, massacring thousands of Palestinian people, including innocents. With weakened spirits, Godard and Gorin questioned the nature of the images they had taken and decided to abandon the project. Godard returned to the material in 1974 with his new collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he discovered that the translations of the words spoken by the Palestinian fighters that were originally given to them had been politically distorted. Godard and Miéville used the recordings from the initial film and conducted an analysis in which they deconstructed the production of the political image, questioning their own partisanship through the juxtaposition of French society and the life of the Palestinian people at war: the here and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Deep in the earth beneath the Norwegian permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. For the first time ever, seeds held there from a major gene bank in Aleppo are now being replicated, after its holdings were left behind when the institution had to move to Lebanon due to the civil war. It is refugees from Syria who are carrying out this painstaking work in the fields of the Beqaa Valley. In the Levant, dry conditions and the power of global agricultural corporations are the biggest challenge, while in the Arctic Circle - where the seed vault was supposed to withstand anything - it is rising temperatures and melting glaciers.</p>
<p>It is Palestinian custom to harvest and forage for plants but they must do so illegally under Israeli law—a process documented in this visual feast, from field to kitchen. Under Israeli law, it is illegal to harvest wild plants that are traditionally used for cooking, such as za’atar (thyme) and akkoub (gundelia), though the practice has been an age-old tradition among Palestinians. In the occupied Golan Heights, Galilee and Jerusalem, locals show their resilience despite the prohibitive law, refusing to be further alienated from their land. From field to kitchen to courtroom, Foragers reveals the joy and knowledge embedded in this Palestinian custom. Imbued with suspense and humour, Foragers is an important commentary on the extent of the Israeli occupation of Palestine—where violence is not only physical, but also cultural.</p>
<p>In Beirut, actors audition for a film based on a soldier’s diary written in Jerusalem in 1915. They interpret scenes, reflect on the First World War and the present-day, and explore longing, identity and memory.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:16px"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif">Aequador is an alternative history built as a travel account without words: an equatorial dystopia evoking the excesses of a progressist and modernist dream in Latin America during the twentieth century. We imagined a bygone era where an extremist ideology would tried to conquer the Amazon territory. The film describes in a composite and voluntarily fragmented way this parallel present, where fake ruins and relics of utopian architecture in 3D coexists with vernacular constructions and daily lifes of human beings</span></span></p>
<p>A political Consciousness identifies and responds to the violence of our institutions through the work of philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. This film is a call to action, conceived in collaboration with Assa Traoré, Edouard Louis, Didier Eribon and other allies.</p>
<p>The murder of a defenseless leader of an indigenous people draws parallels to decades of land theft and centuries of colonialism in Lucrecia Martel's documentary debut.</p>
<p>R. D. Laing, the (anti)psychiatrist from Glasgow, was hard to ignore in the 1960s and 70s due to his radical stances on psychiatry and the way mental illness was socially perceived. Fowler interweaves archival footage of Laing – therapy sessions, colleagues, and critics – with his own film material, resulting in a collage as unconventional as the figure it portrays.</p>
<p>Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: “the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice’.</p>
<p>My mother is a Sociologist – she came to Glasgow from the south of England in the 60’s to work within the Politics Department of Glasgow University- after a few years the Sociologists broke away and formed their own department, where she taught until she retired. Although the university advocated and furnished her with her own personal computer – she still used index cards to make notes on the books and articles that she read. Now that she no longer has an office her house is filled with shoeboxes and filing cabinets containing these cards. My mother was absent on the day that I shot this film; the interview and sounds were recorded at a later date.</p>
<p>Filmed with a Bolex H16 camera and 200ft of film- on location in Aix en provence; in the month of April, 2019. Shot in and around the studio and garden of the painter Paul Cézanne and also on the mountain Saint Victoire; the focus of a long running series of paintings made between 1882 and 1906. Soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda.</p>
<p>Evocation of the life of the music producer Patrick Cowley, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.</p>
<p>COMPETITION Margaret Tait’s life revolved around cinema and poetry. In this documentary, Luke Fowler takes a vast collection of archival material and unpublished and undiscovered correspondence and notebooks to weave together an image of and an original tribute to the Scottish director and poet, blending their sensibilities.</p>
<p>In <em>N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild)</em>, a playful and richly textured ode to the German radio artist and composer Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari—widow of musique concrète pioneer Luc Ferrari—portraiture becomes collaboration, as filmmaker Luke Fowler delves into his subject’s history and practice, and they explore together the collision of sound and image.</p>
<p>A World Not Ours is an intimate, and often humorous, portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family. Filmed over more than 20 years by multiple generations of the same family, A World Not Ours is more than just a family portrait; it is an attempt to record what is being forgotten, and mark what should not be erased from collective memory.</p>
<p>A swarm of bodies and lights clashes with the orderly grids of modernist architecture in Slet 1988, which takes its title from Yugoslavia’s final mass performance-celebration of socialism’s achievements. Through the body of 74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević and the late-1980s diaries of a teenage girl, Marta Popivoda’s incisive film contrasts the collective gatherings of the Socialist Federal Republic’s decline with the rise of nationalism and isolation in the present.</p>
<p>Marwa Arsanios’s new film examines the structures of self-governance and knowledge production fostered by the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement. She asks: what kinds of democracies are enabled without a state, and what kind of ecology is produced under the conditions of war? A propositional portrait of guerrilla ethics, Who is afraid of ideology? Part I disassembles the traditional documentary format, not only to show the contradictions inherent in such a portrayal, but also to doubt the regime of transparency.</p>
<p>In the Douala neighborhood of Bonanjo, some leftover laws make a small space for Baba and his friends to rollerblade. In the shadow of a wall built by a French billionaire to block the sea, among specters of anticolonial resistance, they practice a move called the serpent for hours.</p>
<p>The first full length film to be shot within the disputed Palestinian West Bank “Green Line,” FERTILE MEMORY is the feature debut of Michel Khleifi, acclaimed director of the Cannes Film Festival triumph, WEDDING IN GALILEE. Lyrically blending both documentary and narrative elements, Khleifi skillfully and lovingly crafts a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives.</p>
<p>Since the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, countless Palestinian villages have been erased from the map. MA'LOUL CELEBRATES ITS DESTRUCTION uses poignant images of bombardments, destroyed buildings and disfigured people to illustrate this. All that remains are ruins, bearing silent witness in the landscape. Ma'Loul, just west of Nazareth, is one such ruined village.</p>
<p>Uncovering the early cinematography of a Palestinian revolutionary, an artist considers what it means to bear witness to suffering across time and space.</p>
<p>An exploration into the way images enter our consciousness, framed by the shores of Gaza.</p>
<p>After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Margarita, Yuri and their friends are pushed into exile from Russia as they refuse to comply with the regime. Suspended between countries, they have nowhere to return, and nowhere they feel truly welcome.</p>
<p>An enchanting film about an entire British village reenacting the myth of the Holy Grail over the course of a year. A striking debut film with enormous imaginative power.</p>
<p>Rhayne Vermette’s (Ste. Anne, NYFF59) newest feature spins an eerie tale about humanity’s uneasy relationship with the natural world, featuring a mysterious narrative, tactile visuals, and dense soundscapes.</p>
<p>The Indigenous Bunong practice agriculture by hand and end up in conflict with Cambodia’s lucrative trade in CO2 certificates, losing the forest of whose ownership they have no conception. Now and then, split screen. A visual firework display.</p>
<p>The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee’s first feature, Sherman’s March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.</p>
<p>The Haunted is an intimate video letter to the spirit of the extinct Turan tiger, which disappeared from Central Asia in the 20th century. Today, the tiger lives on in people's collective memory.</p>
<p>Bobby shuttles between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers. Their conversations range from casual to intimate, revealing how anonymous connections create warmth in modern Europe.</p>
<p>Comprising 12 arresting tableaux of the landscapes and shoreline of Fogo Island off Newfoundland, Windward is a work that heightens one’s senses and underscores director Sharon Lockhart’s remarkable eye for color, composition, light, and shadow.</p>
<p>Gamespace becomes a therapeutic alternate reality in And If the Body, which examines the clinical uses of VR and other imaging technologies to treat patients with severe spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular disorders. Toby Lee’s film explores the interface between the physical and the technological, a zone in which the real and the virtual body blurs into one.</p>
<p>An elegant and thought-provoking film shot in graceful black-and-white images that move from room to room in an exploration of location, architecture, and monuments.</p>
<p>An in depth look at ‘FRAPP’, a collective of young Senegalese activists in Dakar, as the country prepares for its most decisive presidential election since independence in 1960. How far are they prepared to go to succeed in their struggle?</p>
<p>“An immersive documentary project about Algerian youth. Filmed at night inside a car in Algiers, the journey becomes a space for free expression. I explore a fragile, often overlooked wisdom, born from intimate thoughts too frequently silenced or dismissed.”</p>
<p>Alejandro Egido returns to his paternal village, now visited only to bury relatives. The film subtly parallels the fragility of human life with that of a village on the verge of disappearing.</p>
<p>The portrait of Eberhard Fischer, a Swiss ethnographer and art historian whose life has been devoted to documenting artistic practices across cultures, from mask carvers in Africa to painters in India. His work led to enduring collaborations, including one with filmmaker Amit Dutta. Drawing on archival footage and memory, the film reflects on a long creative friendship.</p>
<p>Following the Baisanos, the passionate fans of Club Deportivo Palestino, a Chilean first-division football team founded in 1920, the film moves between two narrators who embody Chile and Palestine, reflecting on identity, the meaning of return, and the many ways of going back.</p>
<p>One of Robertson's most life-affirming films, shot entirely within one of her beloved community garden plots, using the asynchronous sound tracks that she often favored, this time with a “score” of baby sounds.</p>
<p>A devastating register of the traumatic sudden death of Robertson's beloved niece that lovingly and desperately connects the lost child with the flowers and gardens that grounded Robertson's life.</p>
<p>Among the most celebrated reels of the Five Year Diary , Reel 22 crystallizes the angst, self-depreciatory humor and raw energy that define Robertson's cinema while showcasing her prowess with stop-motion animation techniques.</p>
<p>In order to draw attention to the situation in Syria, Assem al Basha, a leading figure in artistic dissent, emerges from his melancholic seclusion to sculpt his latest major work: a portrait of Al Maari, the great 11th-century poet whose disillusioned verses remain astonishingly relevant today.</p>
<p>How can we redeem the image when it abandons us? What can we do in the face of massacres and genocides when they take place in darkness, or darkness when there are too many images but they are completely powerless? Following the massacre of protesters in January on the streets of Iran, Bani Khoshnoudi continues her reflection on the role of images and archives in an ongoing and persistent anti-fascist struggle in her country and beyond its borders.</p>
<p>Activists take action to disrupt activities at an air force base after cruise missiles are stored at the facility. The film covers the processes underlying the women’s decisions, and the verve and style with which they developed their own brand of non-violent direct action. From 1983, the Greenham Common Peace Camp was a beacon of non-violent feminist environmental action, changing lives and laws. “The women of Greenham Common taught a generation how to protest,” noted Beeban Kidron. The camp’s courage, creativity, community and humour continue to shine bright for a new generation in this crucial feminist document.</p>
<p>From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by everything and nothing all at once. In the words of Zadie Smith: “Time is not what it is / But how it is felt”</p>
<p>1980, following the election of Ronald Reagan, America rearms. Facing the war machine, two thousand women encircle the Pentagon and awaken another form of power, rooted in care and vulnerability.</p>
<p>Late at night, two lab assistants analyse an unknown substance. A coffee break turns into a fortune-telling session, shifting their gaze from science to intuition. They imagine a space where rational inquiry and foresight coexist.</p>
<p>Torn from childhood to become a soldier, Alain reveals the invisible scars of war and his struggle to find his place in a world that has cast him aside.</p>
<p>In a stony steppe and along its edge, beings emerge like mirages.</p>
<p>Lebanese filmmaker Christian Ghazi considered his striking and ambitious experimental fiction One Hundred Faces for a Single Day to be his 'personal manifesto'. Through disjointed plots and overlapping storylines he delivers a searing critique of the Lebanese bourgeoisie in their apathy and hypocrisy, at the same time as celebrating the militant masses for their sacrifices. Disparities and dissonances are rendered, shard-like, to convey frictions between people on intersecting levels of class, nationality, gender. The film's bold and layered sound design is as jagged as its images – something Ghazi claimed was to prevent the viewer from relaxing while viewing. Radio crackles throughout, complicating the idea of news, received information and its relationship to action. Silence too makes an appearance, sharpening the viewer's focus to the movement of the fida'i tracked from a birds-eye-view as they navigate a rocky terrain. A paean, if not an exhortation, for resistance through direct action – as the resolute voice over, quoting Darwish's Roses and the Dictionary intones: I refuse the roses as defined in a dictionary, or cited in a collection of poems. Roses grow on the arms of a peasant and in the fist of a worker. Roses grow from the wound of a fighter and on a rock forehead.</p>
<p>In 1970, at the initiative of Soraya Antonius (Fifth of June Society), Christian Ghazi and Noureddine Chatti met with a number of Arab political figures, in particular Palestinians residing in Lebanon. Ghassan Kanafani, Sadiq Jalal El-Azm, Nabil Shaath and others share their vision of the Palestinian revolution, tracing its history back to the early 20th century. These testimonies describe the strikes and popular protests that took place in Palestine under the Ottoman occupation, followed by British colonization and the settlement of the Jewish state in 1948. They enumerate the objectives of the struggle, emphasizing the necessity for a free and democratic Palestine, defended through armed or non-armed struggle by all its citizens, men and women of various affiliations.</p>
<p>Virginia Woolf wrote that one needed a room of one's own to create. Today, is it a place, a right, or a privilege? With Nedjma, Anaïs, and Lola, I film. I observe them. But that's not all.</p>
<p>In the lower Himalayas, people depend entirely on the forest for their daily needs of firewood, food and water. But the forests have been destroyed by powerful timber traders.</p>
<p>“Like so many young men of his generation in France, my grandfather was sent to the Algerian War — a war that still haunts him when he has to move into a nursing home. Moving into his house, I try to make his walls, his garden, his memory my own. How to live with the legacy of a ravaged world ?”</p>
<p>A portrait of the Parisian suburbs, which, from wooded fringes to urban, industrial and commercial zones, reveals these territories in their banality and their poetry, caught in the daily movement of workers and commercial flows bound for Paris.</p>
<p>Nothing seems to be moving in Athens and the people are as still as statues. But elsewhere in the city, a caryatid escapes the museum and a small groupuscule demands the destruction of all antiquities. Perhaps filming is the only way to avoid turning into stone.</p>
<p>In the Colombian Amazon, a gaze drifts between the murky waters of the rivers and the forest, a silent witness to the coexistence between the elements and the inhabitants of Puerto Nariño.</p>
<p>Using a model of a building and a life-size window, six inmates enrolled in film and audiovisual training at the Baumettes Prison Release Support Center (SAS) turned the window into a projection screen for their worlds and innermost thoughts. Produced as part of a residency at Studio Image et Mouvement, with the association Lieux Fictifs.</p>
<p>It's a man and his place, the father in a housing estate. It's after his death. Something has been found. Not a secret, but the underside of days, recorded with obsessive precision. A daily struggle with material life and the passing of time.</p>
<p>Itay and Achille are nine years old. Friends since forever, they understand each other without words. Despite their opposite interests, together they grow, protect each other, and love each other. The film follows their games and their way of being in the world together.</p>
<p>“At 105, Sixto Muñoz, known as ‘the last Tinigua man’, left his home for one final journey into the Amazon and disappeared. Following his trail along the Guayabero River, the film retraces his fading world and the extinction of an entire culture.”</p>
<p>The white Ford vans driving around all over Palestine once belonged to the Israeli army, which gave them to train collaborators as a source of income after the Oslo agreements. Soon, they were sold and employed as taxis. Hany Abu-Assad followed cab driver Rajai and his passengers in Ramallah and Jerusalem, along roadblocks and short cuts. The passengers make up a heterogeneous company with divergent opinions about the situation in Palestine and views of the conflict with Israel. Apart from ordinary people, local celebrities such as politician Hanna Ashrawi and filmmaker BZ Goldberg make use of Rajais van. With the bus passengers, the whole film then meanders along some of the determining elements of Rajais life, so we not only gain insight in this young mans character and background, but also into the complex situation in the region.</p>
<p>“110 Years ago, I received a call that brought me into the Real World. Today, I am trying to get out of it.”</p>
<p>Despite their age, Régine and Roger still fly their falcon, Fifi, as they always have. But that day, Fifi does not return. Is it truly the only thing to take flight and vanish?</p>
<p>On the roads Transamazônica, BR-319 and the real village of Realidade, in the south of Amazonia, the encounter between the entity Curupira, a queer devil who protects the forests of Brazil, and the incarnated ghost of Iracema, a 14-year-old prostitute.</p>
<p>With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) describing the rubble of his home in Palestine. Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape provides an elegiac response to the ongoing Palestinian dispossession.</p>
<p>In Saint-Nazaire, heavy industry operates in the open air, where the Loire meets the Atlantic Ocean. The film brings together images of the estuary’s landscapes with the words of those who live and work in the area, portraying them as individuals caught in the contradictions of our time and of contemporary labor.</p>
<p>Juliette Binoche visits CPH:DOX with her debut film as director: An intimate film about the demanding creative process of developing a dance performance with herself on stage.</p>
<p>A portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the video uses visual collage and the musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects — leather-clad bikers, serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray, that of stereotyped male “thug” culture in Palestine. Close-up fragments construct an eroticised and parodic montage of bodies, cars and places, intersected by snippets of dialogue and a monologue about the art of a car wash. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry and unashamed self-praise.</p>
<p>“An exploration of the intimacy that arises between a swimming coach and athlete. In the film, I return to meet my coach five years after having quit competitive swimming and ask to recreate a recurring situation from my teenage years, in which he gives me a massage and I massage him in return.”</p>
<p>Alfred Roch, a prominent Palestinian leader during the British mandate, is a politician with a bohemian panache. In 1942, at the height of WWII, he throws what will turn out to be the last masquerade in Palestine. Inspired by an archival photograph, A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade) recreates an unconventional bon vivant aspect of Palestinian urban life before 1948. Posing silently for a group photo, the unmasked and melancholic pierrots accidentally personify the premonition of an uncertain future.</p>
<p>An experimental documentary exploring the myths and images that have enabled an understanding of Norway as a nation of peace and benevolence. The binding element is a series of enactments by children that recount the myths, historical events and cultural personas that have propelled the image of Norway as a peace nation. These stagings are weaved together with archival footage, political speeches and voice-overs from Hollywood films describing the quintessential Norway. In a satirical deconstruction of the Goodness Regime that permeates Norwegian society, Manna and Storihle explore the moral dilemmas embedded within the history of one of the wealthiest nations on earth.</p>
<p>The film opens with a crackly voice recording of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film Manna follows in Lachmann's footsteps and visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. Manna engages them in conversation around their music, while lingering over that music's history as well as its current, sometimes endangered state. Intercutting these encounters with musicians, are a series of vignettes of interactions of the artist with her parents within the bounds of their family home. In a metaphorical excavation of an endlessly contested history, the film's preoccupations include: the complexities embedded in language, as well as desire and the aural set against the notion of impossibility. Within the hackneyed one-dimensional ideas about Palestine/Israel, this impossibility becomes itself a trope that defines the Palestinian landscape.</p>
<p>A journey to find the headless Buddha statues scattered across a mountain in South Korea. People stroll along the river, the sea, and mountain paths, taking photographs, where images from the past and the desire for excavation overlap.</p>
<p>Five young brothers drive the streets of Phnom Penh each night in search of venues to perform their break-dancing routine to earn something to support their family.</p>
<p>Khaled Jarrar followed Palestinians for over four years on their nerve-racking search for openings in the wall at the heavily militarized Qalandia checkpoint in the West Bank. Running, jumping and crawling through dark tunnels are part of a daily ordeal for Palestinians of all backgrounds seeking routes under and over the wall that blocks access to East Jerusalem. A young woman visits the sick, construction workers scale the wall to work in Israel, families hand over swaddled babies as they wade through dirty water in illegal tunnels, and boys pass fresh bread through holes in the fence. Most undertake their journey in the dead of night, lit only by the sinister orange glow of street lamps on the highway or pursued by the green lasers of the Israeli army. With his handheld camera, Jarrar hides on the side of the road or behind the barbed wire. Unsentimentally, he shows both the humiliation and the resistance against the absurdity, the monotony of waiting and the repression that are part of everyday life.</p>
<p>Twenty years after her mother's death, Laura returns to the family home in Cauca, Colombia. Born from an absence, the film moves through women's voices, silences, and echoes of the past. A gesture of remembrance, between lingering light and the darkness of oblivion.</p>
<p>Daniel Torres enlisted in the US Marine Corps before being arrested and deported to Tijuana in Mexico, upon his return from the war in Iraq. After winning a lawsuit against the US administration, he is now trying to help those who, like him, were banished from a country for which they put their lives on the line.</p>
<p>Djus, a thief with the soul of a filmmaker, uses a smuggled phone to record himself from inside prison, recounting a love story that has stayed with him long after the bars closed behind him. In the film the character and the director together explore and articulate the meaning of love.</p>
<p>Triptych of films shot on Super 8 in Peru: “Modern Rose” studies the geometry of an Inca palace, “Huancor” follows Andean petroglyphs, “Pakatnamu, Premonition” captures the film’s flickers caused by a “huaca” at the edge of the Pacific ocean.</p>
<p>A portrait of the 1960s Scottish anti-psychiatrist and guru, R. D. Laing (1927–1989), who famously perceived a kind of wisdom in schizophrenia, giving it value as more than an illness. The subject is based on unique research into the ‘Kingsley Hall’ experiment (Philadelphia Association 1965-1969) on the initiative of the Scottish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and 60’s zeitgeist writer R.D. Laing. This brave new experiment consisted in breaking down the established norms of ‘treatment’ for people undergoing severe mental distress or breakdown. In Kingsley Hall the pre-conceived hierarchy of doctor-patient relations was dismantled, henceforth no one was encouraged to act out the roles of ‘doctors’ or ‘patients’ (making it very difficult to distinguish one from the other). The film, which is a collage of ‘found’ and archived sound/film recordings, provides an insight into the experiences of the residents at Kingsley Hall, reappraising its relevance in our contemporary society of oppressive psychiatry and multi-national pharmaceutical companies. (Meike Behm)</p>
<p>Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones is one of the founding members of The Homosexuals, a band that lapsed into obscurity after self-releasing a number of groundbreaking records in the post-punk period. Although The Homosexuals disbanded without ever releasing an authorised LP, L Voag (aka Xentos) released his own solo project, The Way Out, in 1979. The Way Out was a cut-up DIY concept album that imagined its musical context situated in an inverted parallel universe where pop music is made by Modernist, Serialist composers and the avant-garde is left to those on the fringes of acceptance. Amos (aka Xentos) continued to produce and distribute a mass of diverse tape projects throughout the 80’s on his own label, Its War Boys, spanning most known and unknown musical genres, under a myriad of multiple identities. THE WAY OUT interweaves new interviews, scripted scenes, found and filmed footage with unearthed Super 8 films by Xentos himself.</p>
<p>A film about the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Cornelius Cardew formed the orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1968 and published their draft constitution in “The Musical Times” in June 1969. The constitution set out the framework, which would dominate the orchestra’s musical work for the first half of its existence. It proposed a fluid community where students, office workers, amateur musicians and some professional composers would gather together for performance, music making and edification.</p>
<p>A portrait of a man who became distrustful of people and withdrew into nature. Bogman is passionate about the threatened habitat of Scotland’s Flow Country. But Bogman’s early life and subsequent diagnosis as “paranoid schizophrenic” conditions his relationships with other people. Describing himself as “the hidden cat” and “wild outlaw of paradise”, Bogman is taking legal action to remove the label “paranoid schizophrenic”. His is both a search for justice and an attempt to find reason in the course his life has taken over the past three decades. Lee Patterson’s evocative field recordings accompany the images.</p>
<p>As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. They are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow.</p>
<p>As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. They are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow.</p>
<p>As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. They are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow.</p>
<p>As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. They are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow.</p>
<p>Western culture has relentlessly attempted to classify noise, music and everyday sounds. Ordinary noises and the mundane sounds that are not perceived as either annoying or musical are of no interest. How then to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Together with sound artists Lee Patterson, Toshiya Tsunoda and Eric La Casa, Luke Fowler’s new film cycle attempts to confront these contradictions through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In part 1, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogues with the sound artist Lee Patterson (Manchester, England). Parts 1 and 2 evolved from filming and recording trips, whose locations were chosen based on a number of geographic and acoustic possibilities.</p>
<p>Western culture has relentlessly attempted to classify noise, music and everyday sounds. Ordinary noises and the mundane sounds that are not perceived as either annoying or musical are of no interest. How then to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Together with sound artists Lee Patterson, Toshiya Tsunoda and Eric La Casa, Luke Fowler’s new film cycle attempts to confront these contradictions through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In part 1, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogues with the sound artist Lee Patterson (Manchester, England). Parts 1 and 2 evolved from filming and recording trips, whose locations were chosen based on a number of geographic and acoustic possibilities.</p>
<p>Western culture has relentlessly attempted to classify noise, music and everyday sounds. Ordinary noises and the mundane sounds that are not perceived as either annoying or musical are of no interest. How then to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Together with sound artists Lee Patterson, Toshiya Tsunoda and Eric La Casa, Luke Fowler’s new film cycle attempts to confront these contradictions through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In part 1, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogues with the sound artist Lee Patterson (Manchester, England). Parts 1 and 2 evolved from filming and recording trips, whose locations were chosen based on a number of geographic and acoustic possibilities.</p>
<p>The film focuses on the work of the Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thompson, who, from 1946 (at the age of 24), was employed by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) to teach literature and social history to adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding. These classes were open to people who historically had been unable to access a university education.E.P. Thompson became synonymous with the discipline of ‘cultural studies’ that emerged in Post-War Britain, along with fellow left-wing critics Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. Fowler’s film explores the issues that were at stake for progressive educationalists. Like Thompson, many desired to use their teaching to create ‘revolutionaries’ and pursue the original WEA values of delivering a ‘socially purposeful’ education. The film captures a moment of optimism, in which Thompson’s ideas for progressive education came together with those of the West Riding and its established tradition of political resistance and activism.The film draws together archival material from television, from local sources and the Workers’ Education Association archive itself, and combines them with new film and audio gathered on location in the former West Riding region of Yorkshire.</p>
<p>An exploration of the role of the Highland traveller in Gaelic Highland history and culture by combining archival footage from the Isle of Barra, new footage and interviews. ‘Luke Fowler’s films dwell on potentiality: what might be, what might have been, what might still be if the world were to turn in a different direction? But film time runs in many directions, as do arguments. Film made only recently can be easily confused with the archival vintage of washed-out or saturated tones and blurred edges. Only the disjunction between sounds that live close within the ear and rich voices from a fading past distinguish archive from present. Gradually the pieces converge: our nostalgia for ancient folkways, traditional song and the romance of freedom, all undercut by scientific rationalism and the pressures of normativity bringing law to bear on lives resistant to conformity. What is an archive if not a collection of letters to ourselves?’ – David Toop</p>
<p>“For Christian was filmed during a residency I had at Dartmouth College, New England, in spring 2013. Through Larry Polanski in the electronic music department I met the composer Christian Wolff, who had taught comparative literature at Dartmouth until 1999. For Christian features short extracts from a longer interview which covered a variety of his compositional strategies from writing text scores for non-musicians to indeterminacy, cueing and his turn in the 1970s to writing pieces with a consciously progressive content. A week or so later I travelled out to his farm in Vermont which he runs with his wife and son and filmed my impressions there. The film is bookended by two of his dedication pieces – one for Alvin Lucier and the other for David Tudor.” (LF)</p>
<p>Anyone who has ever witnessed a performance by Sue Tompkins will be familiar with her dynamic delivery of fragmented texts, be it solo in gallery spaces or as vocalist with seminal turn of the century Glasgow-based quartet, Life Without Buildings. Luke Fowler's films have adopted a similar cut and paste approach to transforming more straightforward documentary footage into something more poetic. Sue Tompkins is filmed in the recording studio as she lays down a version of Country Grammar, one of her earliest performance pieces, which dates from 2003. Rather than adopting a make-believe verité approach, Fowler disrupts the process in various ways, from having sound and vision exist independently from each other to making the camera appear to be jumping up and down. This echoes the playful physicality of Tompkins' performance, which here uses two different microphones, so her torrent of words come to you from all sides.</p>
<p>Luke Fowler constructed this tribute to Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait on the occasion of her centenary. Setting off to Tait's native Orkney, Fowler creates a record of her life and work through images of her past dwellings and filming locations, excerpts from her production diaries, and the reciting of her poem “Houses” in which she reflects on the meaning of home.</p>
<p>A companion piece to Mum’s Cards, For Dan explores an intense period of correspondence between the artist’s late father and his closest friend, radical university lecturer Dan O’Neill. Filmed in an eco-community in Queensland, the film impressionistically documents both the friendship between these two young men and sketches a partial political history of Australia in the early 1960s.</p>
<p>Part 2 of N’importe Quoi. Filmed with Brunhild Ferrari at her home in Montreuil and in several locations in Paris, with sound recordings by Eric La Casa and music by Brunhild Ferrari. A portrait of Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, who, alongside her husband Luc, did as much as anyone to realize the post-Cagean whatever of musical composition, to test the thin line between the form of the world and the forms of art. Fowler begins in Meyer-Ferrari’s charmingly cluttered studio, catching glimpses of her amidst endless stacks of tapes and analog devices for the recording and manipulation of sound. “Je pense sans parole,” she says—“I think without words”—and Fowler cuts to a pair of glasses upon a tabletop in burnished, golden light: some think with microphones, others with lenses. Meyer-Ferrari departs the studio with her microphone to collect the sounds of Parisian parks and train stations. At the moment of this transition from studio to city, she recounts her earliest meetings with the man who would become her husband and collaborator, “He engaged me for work that was really interesting to me: it was research on [the] relationship between sound and image.” Phil Coldiron</p>
<p>In 2023, Fowler embarked on a residency at Prospect Cottage, the former home of artist, filmmaker and activist Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994). Jarman moved to Dungeness in 1986 after being diagnosed with HIV and it soon became a creative hub. Jarman worked across film, art and horticulture there: from his film ‘The Garden’ to journal ‘Modern Nature’, from etched-glass poetry to the shingle beach garden he created. Fowler sought to consider the landscape and weather of Dungeness as well as Jarman’s life by looking at the house he and his partner Keith Collins (1966-2018) left behind. The film touches impressionistically on themes of sexuality, queer British life, art making and nature, and features newly discovered recordings of Jarman and readings from his books by Neil Bartlett. These elements are interwoven with field recordings by Fowler and Chris Watson and an original score by Oliver Coates and Simon Fisher Turner.</p>
<p>A collaborative film by artists Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn that reflects on the legacy of textile designer Bernat Klein (1922-2014). Born in Serbia, Klein emigrated to the UK in the post-war period and based his textile manufacturing business in the Scottish Borders. Developed as part of a residency at Alchemy Film & Arts, the film weaves together two portraits: of the region's famous textile industry and of High Sunderland, the modernist house that Peter Womersley designed for Klein near Selkirk – a house “stitched” into the Scottish landscape that inspired Klein's textile designs.</p>
<p>A short film about the Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an original pioneer of early musique concrète alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the 1950s and 1960s. Here she discusses her “sound hunting” recording techniques, and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialization. Featuring creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands.</p>
<p>In “Susan” I've filmed the Canadian artist Susan Turcot between 1993 and 2011. In “Lisbeth” I've filmed the Swiss artist Lisbeth Burri in her garden outside of Zuerich. Filming portraits allows me to emphasize private gestures and moments beyond narration and documentation. Sometimes I collect footage for years before deciding to edit a portrait, like „Paulina“, „Franz“ or „Susan“ then again a portrait like „Lisbeth“ was filmed only on two occasions and edited shortly afterwards. Ute Aurand</p>
<p>“The concept of memory and image are mixed in this piece to reveal the continuity in the justifications that the Mexican Government issues to perpetuate violence. “Mexico was ruled for 80 years by the same political party, during which power passed unchanged from one president to the next in what some people call a ‘soft dictature.’ These were the years of bloody repressions. One of these terrible events was the massacre of students in 1968 at the Tlatelolco square. In Mexico we use the term ‘hueso’ (bone) to refer to power. A politician fetches a bone, a slice of power.” Elena Pardo</p>
<p>A woman remembers her past by faces she sees while travelling on the London Underground. She begins to believe that these people, like her, have all taken part in the same event. She composes a letter to her friend Fatima – a personal documentary around journeys, memories and watching.</p>
<p>A silent, 16mm film diary captured in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Petaluma and Rohnert Park in California. The film's title references the ONCE Festival of New Music and a visit to the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California.</p>
<p>Orkney was both home and muse for George Mackay Brown. His words are folded into harbours, kirkyards, and the wind off Hamnavoe. This film follows a first journey to the islands, carrying his voice as a quiet companion. Shot on 16mm, it gathers impressions of streets, stones, and tides, where past and present drift together, and where the life of a poet cannot be separated from the life of the place, still visible in the traces left behind. This is not a portrait of a poet, but of the islands that made him.</p>
<p>“Der Klang, die Welt... was filmed in the same site as Listening to the Space in My Room, but now we hear Dieter Staehelin speaking about the place of music in his life, and we join him and Cécile Staehelin playing an Arabesque by Bohuslav Martinů. While they play, I turned the lens at certain moments to white, an open aperture”, Robert Beavers.</p>
<p>In the era of contemporary societies and scrolling, Shadow Boxing tracks the daily life of a solitary protagonist whose ambition is to display his virility. Fueled by his ego and an ordinary pace of life, he sets out on a quest, scrolling through self-motivational content on the internet.</p>
<p>Ali Al Gazzar – a Sufi sculptor – encounters a visitation at midday. The guest spurs Ali to return to his creations, igniting him with the spiritual imagination of Sufi peasants, peripheral objects and rural animals in Cairo’s City of the Dead.</p>
<p>The chronicle of four ordinary lives in Gaza, at the dawn of 7th October 2023: a music teacher, grandfather, a seaside resident and a stable manager. This sensitive observational documentary, which was completed on the eve of October 7, is the result of a filmmakers’ workshop held in Gaza in 2023. Unique in its timeliness, the film is a touching study of masculinity through four portraits of endearing characters representing different ways of life in Gaza. It ultimately constitutes a fascinating time capsule. Gazan Tales is perhaps one of the last testimonies from the Gaza Strip before the outbreak of a total genocidal war. The film closely follows the daily lives of its besieged characters, who navigate between existential angst and survival thanks to a culture of constant adaptation and endurance. They cling to music, animals, the beach, and each other.</p>
<p>Cosmic revolutions beget earthly revolutions in a film about the 2024 solar eclipse, ecstasy, ghosts, birth, death and the English poet and preacher John Donne.</p>
<p>Sampling waterside vistas from the Pearl River to Victoria Harbour, the film unfolds as a scroll across the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. Infra-sensory vibrations become reverberant layers, sensing the distance produced by total interconnection.</p>
<p>After marrying her wife in Switzerland, Chinese filmmaker Yue returns home to confront the quiet fractures between her and her mother. Across generations, two women begin to speak—about marriage, gender, and everything they've kept silent.</p>
<p>Eight men from the Bois d'Arcy prison speak out and paint a portrait of one of their own.</p>
<p>In this first part of the Mohamed collective's trilogy, the young people film their daily lives and their friends around the "Garage", a place they obtained in the city so that they could gather somewhere other than in the street.</p>
<p>Young people aged 15 to 18 stage class relations and the issue of racism which tear apart and separate a group of friends.</p>
<p>“As a Taiwanese in France, I have learned a few things. There are three things I would like to share with you the most. French is difficult… but there are certain things more difficult than French.”</p>
<p>A choir of sighted and unsighted members travels to Japan to sing in the footsteps of the Goze, blind itinerant female musicians whose tradition dates back to medieval times and no longer exists today. Over the course of the journey, their paths, their voices, and moments in time intersect. And our eyes gradually get accustomed to the depths of darkness.</p>
<p>Over the course of a weekend, a filmmaking couple attempts to blend into a community of uniform collectors. In this world of historical reenactment, where the lightness of role-playing collides with the weight of the memories it awakens, the game becomes increasingly unsettling.</p>
<p>“In Arabic, the same word, ‘bayt’, denotes both ‘house’ and ‘poetic verse’. We made this film around this idea, as we inhabit the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, they are part of our lives, as is exile.</p>
<p>Trapped in a forest, six men condemned to eternity search for a way out.</p>
<p>A forgotten musical record connects Caracas to Tehran, revealing untold stories of oil, not as a commodity, but as a political leverage for the liberation struggles in Palestine and building Pan-Arab solidarity between 1960-1970.</p>
<p>“I was at work, coming back from my lunch break, and then suddenly, nothing, no voices, no sound. – No sound? – No sound.”</p>
<p>The Gaza Strip just before bombardment of July and August 2014 when more than two thousand Palestinians and seventy-two Israelis were killed. Scenes of quotidian life in refugee camps and in the city of Rafah, site of one of the two remaining gateways out of Gaza, both of which have been closed since. In Rosalind Nashashibi’s Electrical Gaza (2015), scenes of everyday life in the Gaza strip become mythical encounters with this isolated and besieged fulcrum of the Mediterranean. Filmed on analogue 16mm film, the grain of the surface and interspersed moments of animation create a dreamy atmosphere of respite from the violence typically associated with this enclosed landscape. It was filmed in the months preceding the Israeli ‘Operation Protective Edge’ that bombarded the strip in July and August 2014, this window of time allowed for an image of life in Gaza to be created that counters the mediated images of rubble and destruction with the familiarity of a community operating against all odds. The film is about access and observation of a place that few can get permission to enter or exit, one that became a place of myth after Israel’s military encirclement of the territory in 2007. Àngels Miranda (Artviewer.org)</p>
<p>In France, Juan dreams of the death of an unknown old woman. Later, he learns that his biological mother died that night. In Sweden, Daniel discovers that he was declared dead at birth. They set off in search of their forgotten homeland in southern Chile.</p>
<p>“Maria, 8 years old, lives in Tuscany in symbiosis with nature. She is desperate due to the inevitable eviction by the owners of her playground and the search for a new house in a peri-urban area. I entrust her with a super 8 camera to keep her paradise.”</p>
<p>She looks down at her virtual ghost marked with an X. “If I were walking, I would have found it, even if it’s not here anymore.” Oum Amin, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Maps Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine.</p>
<p>Between 1985 and 1987, American journalist Edward Serotta photographed daily life in Communist Romania. The Securitate secretly photographed him in return. Forty years later, the two archives meet in a shot reverse shot revealing the irony of History.</p>
<p>In the midst of a violent tropical typhoon, a young man struggles to fall asleep. His thoughts are the only source of light in the dark. The film was partially shot in Hanoi during the worst storm the country had seen in seventy years.</p>
<p>Based on Skype conversations with Gaza-based photographers, fixers, and drivers who were behind images that were transmitted from screen to screen in the summer of 2014. The film probes the face of mourning and grief – its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks how the gaze gets channeled within the digital realm, and how empathy travels. Equally, how the documentary signifier – and its abstraction – operate when viewing suffering. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’ – and how many meters or kilometers is that? What is the behavior and political economy of the image of war? Who is the ‘local’ in the representation of war? What is the daily routine of those who represent war?</p>
<p>In France, individuals facing social distress are welcomed into a support structure providing assistance and emergency accommodation. For them, even a peaceful little town becomes a war zone if there is no shelter, no landmark but the threat of « wolves outside ». They struggle for their survival and dignity, with the help of determined social workers.</p>
<p>Life in the Nabatia refugee camp in southern Lebanon, accompanied in voice-over by a letter written to a fedayeen. A response to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who declared that the Palestinian people did not exist. A great classic of Palestinian revolutionary cinema, They Do Not Exist is a must-see film blending a strong political discourse and original cinematographic experiments. With editing that creates a new language, musical sequences criticizing a Western colonialist culture, Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the most important filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, refutes the provocations of Golda Meir. Scenes in the camps, Israeli raids, activist training, Mustafa Abu Ali paints the portrait of daily life in the armed resistance. Yet, he goes further and ends the Palestinian struggle against imperialism a universal dimension: genocide against the Amerindians, genocide in Vietnam and Mozambique, the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany, and Palestine also has its place in this history. Charlotte Schwarzinger, PhD student and cultural programmer, & Marion Slitine, anthropologist and exhibition curator</p>
<p>A record of a history that has been erased, of the Palestinian refugees camp of Tall el Zaatar in Lebanon, that was wiped off the face of the earth. It is the only film that has been made about the massacre.</p>
<p>Shot in Beirut in the Palestinian camps of Sabra, Chatila, Burj al-Barajneh and Ain al-Hulweh, before the Israeli intervention. The camps replicate the streets and houses of Palestinian villages. What the Palestinians recount are their dreams: something of their inner world.</p>
<p>A love story between mother and son through time, autism, and the screen. Since Clovis lost speech at the age of two, Nathalie has tried to find reciprocity with his more-than-verbal means of expression. Combining 30 years of recordings, past and present, “Looking” is an ode to their labors of care.</p>
<p>Yaser Murtaja and Roshdi Sarraj are filming themselves swimming in the Mediterranean: “Good morning, Sea, morning of love, good morning, dear Gaza,” gurgles Murtaja—a photojournalist—joyfully. He is treading water. “Good morning, with the crabs under our feet,” adds his colleague and best friend, Sarraj. The two laugh, then dive beneath the surface. This footage, from 2016, is part of Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production, a new short film by radical geographer Mary Jirmanus Saba and militant musician Tareq Rantisi. (The title references the Lebanese communist and theorist of “the colonial mode of production” Mahdi Amel, assassinated in 1987.) Thirty years after Amel’s assassination, the two young swimmers set up a media organization (Ain Media) dedicated to documenting Gazan life. However, Yaser died at the hands of an Israeli sniper as he filmed the Great March of Return in 2018, and Roshdi succumbed to bombardment in his home in 2023, shortly after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—Hamas’s name for the October 7 attacks—and the subsequent genocidal action against the Strip. The large text on Rantisi and Saba’s screen is forthright with its challenge to the audience regarding these murders: “What is our responsibility to Motaz, to Bisan, to Roshdi, to Yaser? To Gaza?” Conversely, the voice-over addresses the dead eponymous Marxist directly: “My dear Mahdi, what if the path of production, subject as it is to capital’s logic of endless accumulation, has taken us on the road to extinction? In this moment of ecological disarray, the ties between the forces of reaction and resource extraction have never been more clear.” Sophie Lewis (Eflux.com)</p>