Details
From scholar and artist, Oraib Toukan, we present three films borne out of her study of photography, film, and text, from which she seeks native and vernacular understandings of images.
Over images both found and created, bringing us memories, reveries, and snapshots of the everyday, we hear the voices of eminent scholars and practitioners. In Via Dolorosa, we go back to images of the resistance and listen to Palestinian Culture Studies professor, Nadia Yaqub, address the role of cinema in the images of the later revolutionary, Hani Jawharieh. Coming to more recent chapters of violence, When Things Occur, brings us voices of several photojournalists in Gaza contemplate empathy, mourning, suffering and distance as it plays out in their globally-distributed captures of the 2014 onslaught; and finally, Offing invites visual artist, Salman Nawati, to narrate visceral experiences of the 2021 attacks in Gaza, set against images of a peripheral quotidien.
Via Dolorosa (2021, 21’)
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.
When Things Occur (2016, 27′)
When Things Occur is based on Skype conversations with Gazans that were behind the images transmitting from screen to screen in the 2014 Israeli onslaught on Gaza. The film probes the face of mourning and grief—its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks how the gaze gets channelled digitally, and how empathy travels. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’? Who is ‘local’ in the representation of war? And what is the behaviour and political economy of the image of war?
Offing (2021, 29′)
What narratives escape the frame of war, and how do those bearing witness, in turn, consume media? Offing, re-focuses the lens on the tender and the mundane as acts of life, and re-centres rationality as away into the unrenewable essence of sound and subjectivity. Employing the spoken online voice of artist Salman Nawati, against footage shot by Toukan outside of Gaza, the film departs from the summer 2021 war on Gaza.
Playing as part of the London Palestine Film Festival.
