Film Program
INTRODUCTION: Basma Alsharif
اقرأها بالعربية
The following introduction for an inaugural PalFest film program was written just before the onset of the pandemic and lacked foresight in imagining a world worse off than the one we were in – which oddly enough, is a very familiar experience in relation to Palestine. Now that we find ourselves on the other side of a global pandemic, economic divisions seem clearer than ever. In selecting these films to accompany the festival in 2020, I wanted to shift the perspective away from Palestine not to distract from the conflict but to produce rhizomatic connection to the films and how they address imperialism, colonialism, economic inequality and cultural hegemony.
The moment during which I was putting together that program was a time before the pandemic, before the war in Ukraine and the earthquake in Turkey, before ChatGPT. It was before George Floyd and Shireen Abu Akleh and Mahsa Amini were all ruthlessly murdered, to name just a few of the "events" that have taken space in our feeds and news cycles these past three years. As we continue to inch closer to irreversible climate change effects, the necessity to find the space for an aside, for reflection, is the one that allows us to draw unexpected connections and alliances, and in this moment, that’s all we have left.
The most uncomplicated definition of the term Global South delineates rich versus poor countries, developing versus industrialised nations, first versus third worlds, as a status that is geographically locatable. A more nuanced understanding of the term acknowledges the deterritorialization of this status (of a Global South within the Global North, and vice versa) and begins to trace the supremacy of economic power not limited by North, South, East or West. Here we can begin to imagine the complex experience of individuals subjugated by the hegemony of economic alliances that define borders, validate identities (whether racial, religious, or sexual), and decide who is afforded privilege under the Nation State.
Today, in Palestine, the strength of Israel's global economic alliance is synonymous with the viability of the Occupation. Fracturing an internal population, creating various statuses of legitimacy within and outside of the territory, there is no singular voice, no fixed narrative, that can articulate what it means to be a Palestinian today. Rather, there are a multitude of voices and experiences.
In response to this year's theme for PalFest 2023, a handpicked selection of films woven into the program provide an alternate vision to the ruling class's ownership over history, the present and, hopefully, the future.
Engaging with the myriad of ways in which visual language can productively complicate fixed perceptions, these films privilege stories told by bodies — where landscapes come to life as multilayered characters and subjective experience, in all of its biased, nuanced, and ephemeral qualities — and question how we understand ourselves in relationship to power.
As such, these films are not necessarily linear, nor are they narrative — their very form defies our expectations of what the moving image can do and how a film is constructed. They demand our attention, our patience, our discerning eye, and in exchange, invite us into lush, poignant, complicated spaces where a new language for describing inequities, oppressions, and the struggle for a voice under hegemony, is made possible.
THE EXILES (1961)
Kent McKenzie, 72 mins
We encounter a rambunctious group of Native Americans running amuck in Los Angeles in Kent McKenzie's The Exiles. Having exchanged the reservation for a dilapidated Bunker Hill, the film traces the group's wandering over the course of a night out. Without trying to reconcile the past, we are invited to experience the life of disenfranchised youth, battling the tenacity of their origins against the powerful promise of belonging to a society that barely acknowledges their existence. The film begs the question of whether integration will free or further imprison these youth.
SUGARCOATED ARSENIC (2013)
Kevin Jerome Everson & Claudrena N. Harold, 20 mins
A film that opens on a speech by Vivian Gordon, director of the University of Virginia's Black Studies program between 1975 and 1980, played by actress Erin Stewart. Gordon. Addressing a group of students as though she were addressing us in Palestine, Gordon prophetically states "We need to come to grips with some of our realities, some people have this illusion that with the passage of time, progress automatically takes place..."
Sugar Coated Arsenic (shot on black & white 16mm film) is a re-enactment of archives, created with the participation of students of the University of Virginia, in 2012. The films draws us into casual scenes of students gathering on the campus, pouring over texts or playing foosball, with the same tender eye and attention as it draws us onto Gordon's speech. We encounter her words twice and slightly changed: one speech beginning where the other ends; one voiced by an actor the other Gordon's voice overlaid onto restaged images from the past. Speaking of gaining the trust of students as a powerful tool for changing the future, we understand that the seemingly straightforward depictions refer to an enduring struggle as much as they do to the vulnerability of the human body under oppression. The film collapses the past into the present and reminds us of the work still to be done.
WAWA (2014)
Sky Hopkina, 6 mins
A short film by Sky Hopinka, a tribal member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga, Hopinka's Wawa layers visuals, voices, languages and translations around an indigenous language: Chinook Wawa, that originated in the Pacific Northwest and as a result of successive colonization was almost forced into extinction.
Interviews with Wilson Bobb, a native speaker of the Chinook Wawa, are interwoven into a kind of dislocated language lesson involving linguist, Henry Zenk, and Sky Hopinka himself. We experience this layering, through sound and text, some translated, others left unexplained, into a maddening grasp for our attention. Language is access to history and identity, and through the amalgamation of signs that make up this film, we enter into a sonic experience of the perseverance of a people despite all odds.
OCCIDENTE (2014)
Ana Vaz, 15 mins
Sound ushers us into Ana Vaz's Occidente. Arriving from the ocean, we land on the shores of Portugal through lush scenes that activate a visitor's hungry gaze upon the persistence of a colonial past. Sardonic yet playful, the film exotifies power, class, and Imperial culture --turning the cannibalistic colonial quest for the riches of others onto itself. Here the legacy of the occident is rendered into a wild-life preserve of conquest. Devoid of language, the film is rich in visual codes: museum artifacts, trays of food, national monuments and surfers are engulfed by monstrous waves that toss us into the impossibility of a neutral gaze.
DISTANCE DETERMINING (2019)
Coleman Collins, 25 mins
Coleman Collins’ Distance Determining, subtly deceives. A fixed frame and the false objectivity of iPhone videos string together different locations, seemingly from a position of distance. Coordinates and a song unsettle the banality of what we are viewing, forcing us to consider what each of these spaces has to do with one another, how subjects are defined by the sites they happen to occupy, just as we only have the frame of the camera, in the same way a border might come to define the individuals inside and outside of its lines. The longer we sit with this meditation, the more uncomfortable it grows: trade flows, but people are either shipped against their will or prevented from moving forward physically by an invisible force beyond the frame.
ILLINOIS PARABLES (2016)
Deborah Starttman, 60 mins
Deborah Strattman's Illinois Parables, which will be installed on loop, chronologically spans a period of time in what is now Illinois from before the common-era, well into the late part of the 20th century. Through eleven vignettes in different locations across the state, the film upends didactic story telling as it retraces the Trail of Tears and reenacts the murder of Fred Hampton by Chicago police. Skillfully blending archival images with original 16mm film footage, the work takes us on a journey through the history of a place as told by its various inhabitants and their individual connection to the place. What is remarkable is how these seemingly unconnected histories, identities, and landscapes all belong to one state, forcing the collection of bodies and stories we get to know through the film to belong to the same narrative, and thus the same shared future.
INAATSE/SE (2016)
Adam Khalil & Zach Khalil, 75 mins
INAATSE/SE/ a documentary by Adam and Zach Khalil resists linearity in exploring the Seven Fires Prophecy of the Ojibway: the Anishinaabe people of what is now Canada and the northern Midwestern United States. The prediction of the arrival of European settlers onto indigenous land is surpassed and retold by questioning the perspective that has shaped the telling of the history of indigenous fate, unearthing the insidious history of violence by Christian Missionaries.
INAATSE/SE/ is an experiment in form that brings us into the present, responds to the function of archives and museums, and radically complicates the construction of indigenous identity under cultural hegemony. There is no beginning or end in INAATSE/SE, but rather an ongoing, a revision, an examination that actively resists.
TROUBLE (2019)
Mariah Garnett, 83 mins
Mariah Garnett plays with gender roles, casting herself as her estranged Protestant father, in her film Trouble. A trans actor plays her Catholic mother in a film that unpacks the telling of her parents' story via a distorted documentary made by the BBC in 1971. At the height of Northern Irelands Troubles, the interfaith couple falls in love, paralleling the political trauma of Belfast Ireland with the trauma of their personal lives. This quirky and important documentary sutures as it takes the past into its own hands, and drags it into the present of identity politics.
A final note on the program.
Having had the honor to be invited to curate a program of films for this edition of PalFest, I feel it is important to add that I regret that I cannot be in Palestine myself to present these films to you - to be physically present to start a discussion around the multitude of important issues and questions these visual poems open up.
As a Palestinian in the Diaspora I am both lucky and cursed to hold a Gaza ID. Lucky that it has allowed me to continue visiting Gaza as restrictions have tightened around the besieged territory and cursed, as it has meant that for nearly two decades now, I have been forbidden from entering any other part of occupied Palestine or Israel. This is a standard policy, since the Oslo accords, and has forcefully severed Palestinians not only from a sense that we as a people come from one geographical location, but also for complicating the sense that we are enduring the same struggle.
As a festival that takes on the restricted mobility of individuals in and around the territory and resists against this by providing programs across occupied Palestine, I know that the program I have put together is in excellent company with this year's events and in great hands by the team who organize PalFest. I hope that this film program as a whole, by shifting its gaze outward, will create links beyond the geographically locatable Imperialist borders that Israel is imposing.
Basma Alsharif