Based in Ramallah, Al-Haq is the oldest human rights organisation in Palestine. In 2020, Al-Haq’s Forensic Architecture Investigative Unit (FAI) was founded to support the organisation’s legal investigations of human rights violations. Labelled a terrorist organisation by the state of Israel and subjected to numerous digital and physical attacks, Al-Haq’s FAI unit has nevertheless continued its work using open-source investigative tools to geolocate and document patterns of attack in Gaza, in Jenin, and across Palestine. This conversation explores Al-Haq’s revolutionary decolonial methodologies, the role of forensics in producing solidarity, and how solidarity with Palestinian self-determination requires that arts institutions and film festivals reimagine themselves. Panellists include:

Kareem Estefan is an assistant professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research centers on Arab moving-image practices, documentary and Global South cinema, and engagements with colonialism and decolonization in film and contemporary art.

Laliv Melamed is a professor of Digital Film Cultures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her research focuses on media and forms of governance in Israel-Palestine. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence, published by the University of California Press in 2023.

Miranda Pennell is a London-based artist-filmmaker whose films often rework images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations.  Her work emphasises the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents. Her films have screened at New York Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, FID Marseille, Viennale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, London International Film Festival among others.

P Rangan is a film scholar working in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous journal articles and essays on topics such as disability and access aesthetics, accent as crip epistemology, forensic listening, and true crime and abolition.

Stefan Tarnowski is an Early-Career Research Fellow (2022-6) at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His writing has recently appeared in American Ethnologist, Visual Anthropology, Review of Middle East Studies, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books. His book manuscript, Epistemic Murk: Media Activism, Revolution, and War in Syria follows how activists and assorted experts attempted to find social, technical, and political solutions to problems of doubt and uncertainty during the Syrian revolution and war.

Presented in collaboration with World Records Journal.

This event is included in the Rich Mix Venue Pass. Pass holders can book a free ticket to this event and all other screenings and events taking place at Rich Mix as part of the festival. More information on the pass can be found here.