Falastin Film Festival: Reclaiming Rhythms
Two beautiful and powerful medium-length films on the coloniality of archives, reclamation of Palestinian music and dance, and the ethnographic underpinnings of colonization.
About Falastin Film Festival: Reclaiming Rhythms
This event will be followed by a Q&A with Lamees Almakkawy, director of Dancing Palestine.
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me في اثر مادة سحرية (Jumana Manna)
Jumana Manna follows in the footsteps of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Manna visits many of these same groups and communities as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. Intercutting these encounters with musicians are a series of vignettes of interactions of the artist with her parents in the bounds of their family home. Within hackneyed one-dimensional ideas about occupied Palestine, this impossibility becomes itself a trope that defines the Palestinian landscape.
Genre: Documentary | Year of Release: 2015 | Original Languages: Arabic, English, Hebrew | Subtitles: English
Dancing Palestine (Lamees Almakkawy)
To dance is to remember, to dance is to remind. As the Palestinian identity continues to be threatened with erasure, Palestinians turn to their folk dance, the dabke, as an homage to their history and culture and to assert their existence. Dancing Palestine is a documentation of this embodiment of collective memory, as those who piece together a dabke choreography, piece together their identities, too. Together with the film - a performance in itself - the dabke is a testament to Palestinians’ deep love of life, and thus their need to contribute to the archive of Palestine so that it continues to live on in the present.
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Falastin Film Festival (FFF) is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit collective of Palestinians and allies dedicated to bringing Palestinian art to Edinburgh and Highland audiences. Palestinians are often summed up as an ‘occupied people,’ and spoken for, though they have their own stories to tell. Using cinema as a tool of resistance the festival strives to decolonize the narrative and equip audiences with historical context. There is a desire to build community while celebrating Palestinian art and culture through cinema, music, cuisine, and other storytelling mediums. Scotland’s exposure to Palestinian society, art, culture, and humanity altogether remains rather limited. FFF hopes to fill this gap, using both classical and contemporary cinema primarily but not exclusively. They strive to highlight Palestinian steadfast resistance, cultural preservation, stories of love, and in the words of poet Rafeef Ziadah, teachings of life. In so doing, they offer a refreshing portrayal that encompasses the geographic, linguistic, and experiential diversity of the Palestinian people globally.
Visit their website falastinfilmfest.com or follow them on social media @falastinfilmfest.
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