Eye on Palestine: Basma al-sharif (Guest) + The Palestinians
’24
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Deep Sleep © Basma Alsharif
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
In the context of Eye on Palestine, Art Cinema OFFoff proposes a film program and discussion inspired by Reem Shilleh and Gawan Fagard’s recent article, Searching for the Palestinian Militant Image in Times of Existential Emergency: How can the moving image be in solidarity with political resistance? This text was commissioned by the Belgian film magazine Fantômas (NL), and published jointly with MUBI Notebook (EN).
In the presence of Basma al-Sharif, an artist and filmmaker of Palestinian origin, born in Kuwait, and raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip.
Followed by a discussion between Basma al-Sharif, Reem Shilleh and Gawan Fagard
Reem Shilleh is a researcher, curator, editor and artist, living and working between Brussels and Ramallah. Gawan Fagard is a researcher and lecturer (Zürich University, Antwerp University, ULB & RITCS).
Thank you to EYE Film Museum Amsterdam for the English subtitled 16mm copy of Johan van der Keuken’s De Palestijnen (The Palestinians, 1975)
Johan van der Keuken
De Palestijnen
In 1975, on the eve of the Lebanese civil war, Johan van der Keuken travelled to southern Lebanon on behalf of the Netherlands Palestine Committee. He filmed the rural population between two fires: the Israeli artillery and the local feudal rulers. Van der Keuken shows the Palestinians’ struggle as a class struggle. He sees parallels between the class divisions in Europe that gave Nazism and anti-Semitism a chance and those in the Arab world that make Palestinians, as newly dispossessed, an explosive situation. The Palestinian struggle, aimed at returning to their land, was seen by Van der Keuken in 1975 in the perspective of a democratic Palestine, where Jews and Palestinians could live and work together. The movie is at once personal and scientific: interviewing Palestinian refugees in Southern Lebanon who recount in their own words their experiences as refugees and resistance fighters, while also explaining the historical development of zionism and the Palestinian resistance through an analysis capitalism and imperialism.
De Palestijnen, Johan van der Keuken © Noshka van der Lely, EYE
Basma al-Sharif
O, Persecuted
O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian militant film, Our Small Houses, into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.
O, Persecuted © Basma Alsharif
Basma al-Sharif
Deep Sleep
Temporarily restricted from travel to the Gaza Strip because of border conflict, I undertook the study and practice of autohypnosis with the purpose of bi-locating into multiple places at once. Paired with field recordings rendered into a binaural beat soundtrack, Deep Sleep is made up of a year’s worth of bi-location sessions recorded onto Super8mm film. The result is a movement through the ruins of ancient civilizations as embedded in modern civilization-in-ruins. Deep Sleep draws from the historical avant-garde cinema to produce an invitation to move through landscapes and transcend geographical borders in a collective act that discards memory in exchange for a visceral present.
Deep Sleep © Basma Alsharif
Deep Sleep © Basma al-Sharif
De Palestijnen, Johan van der Keuken © Noshka van der Lely, EYE
Eye on Palestine (21 Nov. - 20 Dec.). Image by Laila Shawa, courtesy the Estate of Laila Shawa and October Gallery, London.
