This programme brings together two films that reclaim archival images from the colonial gaze, transforming records of domination into sites of resistance, memory, and political intervention. By revisiting and reworking historical footage, the programme asks how archives can be activated to contest official histories and recover what colonial image-making sought to erase.

Screened as part of Falastin Film Festival (27—30 August).

About the films

Kamal Aljafari: UNDR

The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests.
This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.

Diana Allan: Partition

Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told. Recovering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, unraveling colonial pasts through soundscapes of the precarious present, Partition is a meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget.

After the screenings there will be a Q+A with directors Kamal Aljafari and Diana Allan.