Film Screenings / Programs / Series
MY HOMELAND IS NOT A SUITCASE: ANNEMARIE JACIR, EMILY JACIR, AND DAR JACIR FOR ART AND RESEARCH
September 6 – September 9
September 6-9, 2024
This series spotlights the work of Palestinian artists and sisters Emily and Annemarie Jacir, whose respective practices as visual artists and filmmakers parallel a decades-long history of curation, preservation, and dissemination of Palestinian films. The program also focuses on Dar Jacir for Art and Research, which was founded in 2014 as an artist-led and women-led interdisciplinary space devoted to educational, cultural, and agricultural exchanges and productions in Bethlehem and beyond.
The series comprises three parts, with the first two sections highlighting the Jacir sisters’ respective practices and curatorial histories. The final chapter, devoted to Dar Jacir, celebrates the art space’s current vision of incubating and fostering new generations of artists, makers, and thinkers.
As its name suggests, the series is a staunch refusal of the dispossession that has threatened Palestinian art, film, and their creators for so many decades. By that same token, it is a celebration of rare and underseen work that deserves to be showcased and protected.
Emily Jacir will be here in person for the screenings on Saturday, September 7, and for the 8:00 screening on Sunday, September 8!
Special thanks to Annemarie & Emily Jacir, Aline Khoury, and Bora Kim.
PART 1: ANNEMARIE JACIR
Over the past twenty years, Annemarie Jacir has established herself as one of the preeminent Palestinian filmmakers in contemporary cinema, having written and directed three remarkable feature films and numerous shorter works. Her feature debut, SALT OF THIS SEA (2008) was the first feature-length narrative film by a Palestinian woman, and her subsequent features – WHEN I SAW YOU (2012) and WAJIB (2017) – have been widely acclaimed. Alongside her filmmaking, Annemarie Jacir has furthered the cause of Palestinian cinema through her work as a curator. She has organized numerous programs and festivals, above all the pioneering “Dreams of a Nation” project (2003). The first Palestinian film festival to take place in NYC, “Dreams of a Nation” traveled throughout Palestine the following year, and marked the first screenings within Palestine itself of many of the foundational works of Palestinian cinema.
Annemarie Jacir
WHEN I SAW YOU / LAMMA SHOFTAK
2012, 93 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.
1967: the world is alive with change: brimming with reawakened energy, new styles, music, and an infectious sense of hope. In Jordan, a different kind of change is underway as tens of thousands of refugees pour across the border from Palestine. Having been separated from his father in the chaos of war, Tarek, 11, and his mother, Ghaydaa, are amongst this latest wave of refugees. Placed in “temporary” refugee camps made up of tents and prefab houses until they would be able to return, they wait, like the generation before them who arrived in 1948. With difficulties adjusting to life in Harir camp and a longing to be reunited with his father, Tarek searches for a way out, and discovers a new hope emerging with the times. Eventually his free spirit and curious nature lead him to a group of people on a journey that will change their lives.
“A touching, beautiful masterpiece of a film, an ode to the displaced the world over and to any of us who have ever lived somewhere other than our own birth country, yearning for home.” –HUFFINGTON POST
Fri, Sept 6 at 6:15 and Mon, Sept 9 at 9:00.
ANNEMARIE JACIR SELECTS:
Mustafa Abu Ali
THEY DO NOT EXIST / LAYS LAHUM WUJUD
1974, 25 min, 16mm-to-digital
One of the most important works by Mustafa Abu Ali, who co-founded the Palestine Film Unit and is considered one of the “fathers” of Palestinian cinema, THEY DO NOT EXIST documents the conditions in Lebanon’s refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. Shot under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, it is a stylistically unique work which stands at the intersection between the political and the aesthetic. In 2003, as part of the “Dreams of a Nation” festival, Annemarie Jacir organized its first ever screenings within Palestine, and – in the face of Israeli officials’ refusal to grant Ali a travel permit – went to extraordinary lengths to smuggle Ali himself from Ramallah into Jerusalem for the initial screening.
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Akram al Ashqar, Nahed Awwad, Liana Bader, Riyad Deis, Rowan al Faqih, Ahmad Habash, Ismael Habbash, Annemarie Jacir, Enas Muthaffar, Razi Najjar, May Odeh, Amer Shomali, and Mohanad Yaqubi
PALESTINE, SUMMER 2006
2006, 35 min, digital
“Founded in late 2005, the Palestinian Filmmakers’ Collective’s goals include working with the Palestinian community to screen films, share technical and artistic skills, help make Palestinian films and information more widely available, create a Palestinian video library, and organize activities and projects to promote Palestinian cinema. In mid-2006 the collective invited established and new Palestinian filmmakers to come together in a project that would reflect the ‘mood’ of that summer. Limited to three minutes or less, the filmmakers were also restricted to using only one shot to tell their stories.” –PALESTINE FILM FOUNDATION
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Fri, Sept 6 at 9:00.
Annemarie Jacir
WAJIB
2017, 96 min, DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.
Starring real-life father and son Mohammad and Saleh Bakri, Annemarie Jacir’s comic drama explores the lives of Palestinians living in Israel. The title of Wajib translates as “duty”, and it’s duty that brings architect Shadi from Rome back to Nazareth, where his sister Amal is to be married. Local tradition dictates that Shadi and his divorced dad, Abu Shadi, must drive around town delivering wedding invitations. Friction is in the air even before the duo clamber into Abu Shadi’s beloved and beaten-up old Volvo. Shadi thinks the exercise is outdated and meaningless. For his father, it’s about maintaining important community rituals. Bakri and son Saleh are terrific and earthily funny as the bickering duo who meet colorful characters on their cross-city travels. Jacir brings a worldly, wise, and witty eye to this hugely entertaining and illuminating slice of Palestinian life.
“What does it mean to be a Palestinian abroad? What does it mean to be a Palestinian at home? Can the struggle between the two identities tell us something honest about a Palestinian society living under the Israeli occupation? […] WAJIB is a day-long road trip into a very diverse Palestinian community, which is sometimes treated with a subtle and slightly dark humor; it’s a community that the father struggles to keep united and the son simply no longer understands. Wajib means ‘duty’ in Arabic – here, that denotes the duty to accept each other, to keep identity alive in a city where Israel doesn’t recognize Palestinian citizens as Palestinians, and also the duty to criticize (as Jacir has publicly declared) the Palestinian leadership that seems to be more and more disconnected from the people than ever.” – Lorenzo Esposito, CINEMA SCOPE
Mon, Sept 9 at 6:30.
PART 2: EMILY JACIR
Emily Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. Her artistic career has seen her exhibit widely throughout the world, and receive numerous awards including the Hugo Boss Prize in 2008 and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts in 2015; an honorary doctorate from NCAD in Dublin, Ireland; an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize (2023); the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015); and the Alpert Award (2011) and Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008). She has also played a crucial role in researching, restoring, and exhibiting Palestinian cinema over the years. In collaboration with Monica Maurer, she helped unearth, reassemble, and restore works of early Palestinian cinema, including TALL EL-ZAATAR (1977), and has curated several important festivals or programs devoted to such films, including establishing the Alwan Arab Film Festival in New York from 1999-2002, which showcased Palestinian cinema for the first time in NYC; the 2002 Palestine International Video Festival (the first video festival to take place in Palestine and show the work of regional videomakers as well as international artists), and the New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival in 2007. Jacir has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and is deeply invested in creating alternative spaces for knowledge production internationally.
SHORT FILMS BY EMILY JACIR
This program brings together a selection of Emily Jacir’s single-screen moving-image works, as well as a brand-new single-screen version of her recent installation work, WE ATE THE WIND, created especially for this film series.
15 PALESTINIAN MINUTES IN PALESTINE (1999, 15 min, digital)
LYDDA AIRPORT (2009, 5.5 min, digital)
LETTER TO A FRIEND (2019, 43 min, digital)
WE ATE THE WIND (2023, 31 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Sat, Sept 7 at 4:00. Emily Jacir in person!
EMILY JACIR SELECTS:
SHORT FILM PROGRAM FROM THE 2007 NEW YORK ARAB AND SOUTH ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL
This program replicates a selection of films that Emily Jacir curated for the 2007 New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival, which focused on Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema, and included the first NYC screening of Mustafa Abu Ali’s THEY DO NOT EXIST (the version screened here also features an English translation Emily Jacir and Emna Zghal created specifically for the festival). Alongside the short films listed below, we will be screening a selection from the “War Diaries” – short videos conceived of and created by Emily Jacir, Jawad Metni, Prerana Reddy, and others, which were presented as part of the 2007 festival – that comprise footage shot by videographers and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Minimally edited by Emily and her colleagues and presented without voiceover commentary, the “War Diaries” aimed to convey glimpses of life under siege and occupation, in a format and perspective rarely seen in television news.
Qais Al-Zubaidi AWAY FROM HOME (1969, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Qais Al-Zubaidi THE VISIT / AL-ZIYARAH (1972, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Mustafa Abu Ali THEY DO NOT EXIST / LAYS LAHUM WUJUD (1974, 25 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Monica Maurer BORN OUT OF DEATH (1981, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Samir Nimr KOFR SHOBA (1972, 34 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sat, Sept 7 at 6:30. Emily Jacir in person!
EMILY JACIR SELECTS:
Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman
INTRODUCTION TO THE END OF AN ARGUMENT: (INTIFADA) SPEAKING FOR ONESELF…SPEAKING FOR OTHERS…
1990, 45 min, video
With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of “live” footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, INTRODUCTION TO THE END OF AN ARGUMENT critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media’s forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction. A process of displacement and deconstruction is enacted attempting to arrest the imagery and ideology, decolonizing and recontextualizing it to provide a space for a marginalized voice consistently denied expression in the media.
Sat, Sept 7 at 9:15. Emily Jacir in person!
PART 3: DAR JACIR
Dar Jacir for Art and Research, founded in 2014, is a multi-disciplinary space devoted to educational, cultural, and agricultural exchanges in Bethlehem, Palestine. A process and practice-oriented platform, it is an experimental learning hub for the Bethlehem community and beyond. Through a participatory approach, collective knowledge is created, new works are produced, and structures for care and repair are fostered. Dar Jacir is the only artist-led space in the Southern West Bank that provides arts education and residency programs for both Palestinians and internationals, operating across visual arts, sound, cinema, performance, dance, literature, and agriculture. Dar Jacir for Art and Research is co-directed by Aline Khoury and Emily Jacir.
The two programs below showcase some of the many moving-image works that have been developed, produced, made, preserved, or rediscovered at Dar Jacir.
DAR JACIR, PGM 1:
Jumana Manna
FORAGERS
2022, 64 min, DCP. In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles.
Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, FORAGERS employs fiction, documentary, and archival footage to show the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on Palestinian foraging practices. The restrictions prohibit the collection of wild ’akkoub and za’atar, and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds of people – exclusively Arabs. While Israel insists the laws are necessary to protect the native plants from extinction, for Palestinians they constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land and culture. Though singular in its focus, FORAGERS provides a striking illumination of the links between land, food, indigeneity, law, and the quotidian defiance necessitated by life under occupation.
Preceded by:
Jumana Manna JOURNEYS TO THE ENDS OF SHU’FAT (2019/20, 4.5 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
Sun, Sept 8 at 5:30.
DAR JACIR, PGM 2:
Duncan Campbell & Samer Barbari NOTHING IMPOSSIBLE (2018, 4 min, digital)
This video documents the project Duncan Campbell created during his Dar Jacir residency, in which he worked with Samer Albarbari to restore and repaint a 1987 Peugeot 405 car.
Stéphanie Janaina VER EL MAR (2022, 7 min, digital)
“I have a game I enjoy playing with kids, called ‘What do you see that isn’t what it is but you believe it is?’. We randomly pick an object and explore all the possibilities it holds. This is how a pen can become a spaceship, a flute, an earring, a telescope, a car lever. However, how does this game function when, everywhere you turn towards, there’s a wall? How do you play this game when, despite the desire to see beyond the wall, you shouldn’t? Such a wall must be seen as what it is; transforming it into a poetic and imaginative possibility equals silencing and making invisible its reality. Because this wall, like many others, should not exist.” –Stéphanie Janaina
Eli Wewentxu & Nicolás Jaar IMPro PITXANTU (2023, 13 min, digital)
This video was made by musicians Eli Wewentxu and Nicolás Jaar during their Dar Jacir residency in October of 2023, which – due to the war in Gaza – took place at Wewentxu’s farm in Chomio, near Temuco in Wallmapu. The artists organized a community event that featured Mapuche activists discussing their struggles in their territory, while Jaar discussed the situation in Palestine, drawing parallels and identifying resonances between the anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance of the Mapuche and the Palestinian people.
Rolando Hernández THE THIRD OPTION (2020, 17 min, digital)
This audiovisual essay – which began as part of Hernández’s 2019 residency at Dar Jacir – is part of an ongoing research project trying to understand the nature of privilege, its politics and mechanisms, and how the concept of representation is linked with those of identity and territory.
Emily Jacir, Andrea De Siena, Laura Esposito & Luca Rossi PAESAGGIO UMANO (2022, 7 min, digital)
A select group of professional dancers and musicians who have previously attended dance and music workshops at Dar Jacir were invited to participate in this advanced workshop to create a dance and song. Prior to coming to the workshop, participants were asked to research topics related to land, farming, agriculture, memory, and earth. After sharing their research, they began building a piece together through dance and an original music score.
Andrea De Siena & Emily Jacir WHEREVER YOU SOW GRAIN, THE GRAIN GROWS (2022, 6 min, digital)
This piece emerged from a three-day music and dance workshop at Dar Jacir. The participants focused on the tammurriata – the dance of the earth – a peasant dance whose movements are inspired by agricultural work. The dance on the drum (tammurriata) represents one of the possible ways man connects with his own land; a land which signifies hard work and through divine invocation gives good fruits.
Dima Srouji PERFORMING ARCHAEOLOGY (2019, 6.5 min, digital)
This video explores the displacement and violence of the archaeological site, Sebastia, Palestine.
Monica Maurer YOM AL ARD / LAND DAY (1981/2019, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital)
This film – which was recently restored and digitized – portrays the fragmentation of the land, the experience, and the people of Palestine, showcasing the systematic efforts to disperse, fragment, and destroy the audiovisual memory and collective identity of Palestinians. It is composed of rare footage shot in the Galilee in celebration of the 5th Land Day Anniversary in March 1981.
Majdi El Omari AL NAWSS (THE QUIVER OF THE BRANCH BY THE WIND) (1989, 25 min, 35mm-to-digital)
AL NAWSS is a film about a Palestinian refugee questioning his yearning and belonging for a place he does not even know.
Total running time: ca. 105 min.
Sun, Sept 8 at 8:00. Emily Jacir in person!
