The New Militants picked up the camera from beside Hani Jawherieh’s body and refused to let the tradition of radical filmmaking die with him. This strand brings together for the first time contemporary work from Palestinian filmmakers, and their international allies, who have inherited the legacy of Palestine’s original militant cinema movement. Their image-making is not only a reflection of liberatory politics, but a political act in itself. Works like Basma Alsharif’s fragmented ode to restoration and degradation O, Persecuted (2014), and Azza El Hassan’s tender anecdotes as cinematic eulogy A Remake of a Revolutionary Film (2019) are crafted directly from the shrapnel of past militant films. In Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022), Kamal Aljafari plunders and sabotages the Israeli military archive in poignant revenge for their theft of the Palestinian Cinema Institute archive in 1982. Mary Jirmanus Saba’s anti-colonial collage Mahdi Amel – The Colonial Mode of Production (2024) wraps footage from the 1973 film in a tearful embrace around recent documentation of the genocide in Gaza. yann beauvais’ néantir (2024) is an unrelenting and unapologetic dialectical cascade of first-person militant videos and news footage. 

Programme:

A Remake of a Revolutionary Film (Azza El-Hassan, 2019, 7′)
O, Persecuted (Basma Alsharif, 2014, 12′)
Mahdi Amel – The Colonial Mode of Production (Mary Jirmanus Saba, 2024, 16′)
néantir (yann beauvais, 2023-2024, 12′)
Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (Kamal Aljafari, 2022, 19′)

Curated and introduced by Saeed Taji Farouky.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Dr. Nadia Yaqub, Professor of Arabic language and culture and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the author of Gaza On Screen (2023) and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (2018), and Mario Hamad, filmmaker, academic and scholar-practitioner in militant cinema and activist film, and lead tutor of UCL’s Militant Cinema & Activist Film course.

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