Emily Jacir
, 2019
, 43 min
A close friend is asked to start an investigation before an inevitable act occurs. Interlacing images, textures, movements, traces and sounds of over a century, letter to a friend recounts in minute detail a home and street in Bethlehem.
Oraib Toukan
, 2006
, 2 min
A performance video referencing Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 classic “Memory for Forgetfulness”. Made 18 years ago the work is part of a duology titled Counting Memories following the summer of 2006 when Israel launched a war on both Gaza and Lebanon one month apart. The video reveres the act of writing and the will to remember. In…
Sky Hopinka
, 2021
, 4 min
Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist. Employing an original syntax of storytelling, the artist interweaves scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio, poetic text, and music. A rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial plunder, Hopinka’s fluid reflections…
Joe Namy
, 2024
, 5 min
Libretto-o-o is an exploration of the history and resonance of Middle Eastern opera. Shot across six historically significant opera houses in Algiers, Beirut, Cairo, Marrakech, Muscat, and Tunis – some of which were never completed, others ranking amongst the most lavish theaters ever constructed – this architecture film offers a meditative portrait of the grand theater;…
Coleman Collins
, 8 min
Primarily derived from 3D scans of objects, and with a particular focus on digital replicas of West African architectural sites, Specular fiction is a short, speculative narrative video that traces the complex relationships between seemingly dichotomous terms: original and copy; object and image; real and virtual space. In an imagined future of indeterminate distance, the objects of…
Djouhra Abouda, Alain Bonnamy
, 1976
, 59 min
Synopsis: Ali in Wonderland is a radical, experimental, and politically astute essay on the condition of Maghrebi immigrant workers in France in the 1970s. Recently digitized and restored in 4k by l’Image Retrouvée from the original 16mm negatives and an exhibition print, the film’s images were (in the words of its filmmakers) “filmed like blows of the…
Mostafa Derkaoui
, 1974
, 76 min
Synopsis: In January 1974, Mostafa Derkaoui returned to Casablanca from his studies at the film college in Łódź, Poland. Together with his brother Abdelkrim, he shot his first film in the city’s bars and streets, in the harbour and the poorer districts. The independently produced film was borne by a collective energy unique in the cultural…
Ahmed Bouanani
, 1971
, 24 min
Synopsis: In the late 1960s, Ahmed Bouanani—working as an editor for the CCM—was “exiled” to the organization’s cinematic archives as a punishment for alleged leftist sympathies. Turning the assignment to his advantage, he made a found-footage film that repurposed the documentaries produced by the French during the colonial period to a strong anticolonial essay film. While…
, 1968
, 16 min
Synopsis: Six and Twelve is one of a series of short films and documentaries produced under the auspices of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain in the years after Moroccan independence. While most of these were utilitarian in nature, Bouanani, Tazi, and Rechiche took a different route with this film, creating a modernist “city symphony” film that documented six…
Mohammad Malas
, 1984
, 120 min
Synopsis: When his father dies, Dib, his younger brother and their mother (Yasmine Khlat) move away from their hometown Quneitra to Damascus. The mother’s despotic father reluctantly takes them in and tries to force the mother to remarry. Overwhelmed by the magic of the city, Dib wants to discover everything and is full of dreams but…
