#1: Palestine Film Institute
This is Film! #1: Palestine Film Institute
For the opening session of This is Film!, activist and filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky of the Palestine Film Institute discusses the erasure of Palestinian film history under Isreaeli occupation and the film institute's commitment of programming and preserving militant films as a form of resistance.
Palestinian cinema history has a historical wound:the archive was stolen in 1982 by the Israeli military, and never returned. Today, it exists as a distributed, incomplete, and embodied archive. The Palestine Film Institute was founded to develop, promote, and preserve Palestine's cinema heritage, understanding that culture is fundamental to Palestinian resistance and resilience, and cinema is a crucial component of the liberation movement.
In this talk, Saeed Taji Farouky will discuss the absence inherent in the Palestinian archive, the unique philosophy of the Palestine Film Insitute's archival work, and the timeless principles of militant cinema upheld in its films.
Alongside the talk will be a screening programme of three short films: one from the original period of militant cinema, They Do Not Exist (1974), and two more recent works by artist Basma Alsharif and filmmaker Yann Beauvais that carry the legacies of that period into contemporary filmmaking. The session will be moderated by Jamil Fiorino-Habib, PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, whose research focuses on the infrastructures of film archives across the Southeastern Mediterranean.
Guest
Saeed Taji Farouky is a Palestinian/Egyptian filmmaker, activist, and radical educator. His film work is heavily inspired by the principles of militant cinema, and he is founder of the Radical Film School, a free film course dedicated to political filmmakers from marginalised backgrounds.
Programme
They Do Not Exist (Mustapha Abu Ali, LB 1974, 25’)
Documentary film covering the conditions in Lebanon’s refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. Mustapha Abu Ali was an important figure in the history of Palestinian film history. They Do Not Exist was saved from the ruins of Beirut after 1982 and has only recently been made available.
O' Persecuted (Basma al-Sharif, PS/GB 2014, 12’)
Experimental short film by Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif, which takes the restoration of Kassem Hawal’s militant film Our Small Houses (1974) as its starting point.
neantir (yann beauvais, FR 2024, 12’)
Filmmaker and artist yann beauvais comments on the genocide happening in Palestine Since October 7, 2023.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2026
Length
150 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
This is Film! 2026
This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice is an annual public lecture series in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam devoted to notable projects in the fields of film restoration and film heritage, with international guest speakers and film screenings.
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