Join us for a screening of four documentary short films that explore geography using a range of techniques, including cartographic mapping, 3D reconstruction, soundscape recordings, digital spatial imaginaries, that all reverberate through the poetics of Palestinian landscape. This event is organized by the Center for Palestine Studies and co-sponsored by Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.

The screenings will be followed by a response by Alessandra Amin, the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies.

FILMS
Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old & So Was the Nakba
Dir. Razan AlSalah, 2017, 7 mins.
Oum Ameen, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Maps Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine. 

Ambience
Dir. Wisam Al Jafari, 2019, 15 mins. 
Two young Palestinians try to record a demo for a music competition inside a noisy crowded refugee camp. While failing recording because of the chaos of the place, they discover an authentic way to allow them to meet the deadline creatively.

Un-Forming Zionism
Dir. Khalid Al-Bashir, 2021, 16 mins. 
Unforming Zionism is a multimedia visual essay centered on an investigation into the Haifa Governmental Hospital in Palestine, built-in 1938. Through counter-cartographic decoding of the material, economic and political networks complicit in the construction of the hospital, the video-essay offers a lens through which we can observe and understand colonial Zionist and British collusions that led to the dispossession of Palestinians.

Our songs were ready for all the wars to come
Dir. Noor Abed, 2021, 21 mins. 
Our Songs were Ready for all the Wars to Come explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge, and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can ‘folklore’ become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it? Captured through mediums of film and sound, situated stories are archived and represented, creating a context that explores the capacity of social formation, and the possibility of recalling a memory that is capable of decentralizing images of fixity; a memory that is liberated from monuments. 

FILMMAKER BIOS
Based in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal, Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds. Her work has shown at community-based and international film festivals & galleries including Art of the Real, Prismatic Ground, RIDM, HotDocs, Yebisu, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art and Sursock Museum. AlSalah co-directs the Feminist Media Studio with Krista Lynes and teaches film and media arts at the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.

Noor Abed (b. 1988, Palestine) works at the intersection of performance, media and film. Through a process of image making, her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, The New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles, Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montréal, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, and MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24 and was recently awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.

Wisam Al Jafari is a filmmaker born in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. He obtained his BFA in filmmaking from Dar Alkalima University ,and has worked in many films as an Assistant Director, Location Manager, Camera Assistant and Sound Engineer. Wisam also made few short fictions and experimental films.

Khaled Al-Bashir is an architect and researcher who employs multimedia methods to explore the intersections between design, space, and politics. He is interested in using architecture and its tools to decipher social and political realities. He has taught at Falmouth University and the Architectural Association Summer School, and his work has been exhibited at Darat Al-Funun and The Palestine Museum.

SPEAKER
Alessandra Amin is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow in Palestine Studies at Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies. She holds a PhD in Art History from UCLA. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Darat al-Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the U.S. Department of Education. She is is working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982, which looks to an era of history bookended by the launch of the Palestinian Revolution and the demolition of its epicenter in Beirut. Read more.

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators
Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.

While traveling around the world to present his previous film, Off Frame, an all-archival exhumation of Palestinian revolutionary cinema, Yaqubi met someone who claimed to have a voluminous collection of pro-Palestinian work ... in Japan. Using that footage, R 21 aka Restoring Solidarity offers a fascinating, eclectic, and inspiring survey of cross-continental solidarity. Some are imported, dubbed, and re-edited films from Palestine, others are Japanese-made documents, replete with location interviews with PLO leaders and frontline reporting, made for leftists agitating for upheaval in their own country. Yaqubi maintains every layer of overdubbing and subtitling, letting the transferals, transmutations, and identifications leave marks on the record, like fossil impressions on the celluloid. Sporadically, a contemporary voice weighs in on the soundtrack—a call for, and a reclamation of, collective resistance.

Mohanad Yaqubi is a Palestinian filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production house Idioms Film. Yaqubi also is one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, which focuses on militant film practices, and a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute. His film No Exit (2015, written with Omar Kheiry) premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival. His feature Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (2016), screened at TIFF, Berlinale, cinema du reel, Dubai IFF, and other festivals worldwide. Since 2017, he has been a resident researcher at the School of the Art (KASK) in Gent, Belgium. 

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.