As Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, we invite you to join us for a curated programme of international short films for Palestine, screening as a fundraiser for Gaza charities, in partnership with MCR Palestine Film Festival and Comma Press.
Dec 5, 2024
7pm / The Carlton Club / Manchester M16 8BE
All welcome. Book tickets here
This special programme includes highlights from Braziers International Film Festival, including this year’s award-winning film Vibrations from Gaza, directed by Rehab Nazzal. Featuring new films made with the renowned Palestinian oud player Reem Anbar, the screening includes The Key, adapted from the short story by Anwar Hamed (published in Palestine + 100 by Comma Press), and concludes with Selfish Road, a 30 minute 4-part road movie filmed in Jersusalem by Turner Prize-winning artist Oreet Ashery.
To start the programme, we’re delighted to welcome poet Nikki Mailer, reading from her debut poety collection Collecting the Bones. The poems explore Nikki’s roots, her Jewish heritage, justice for Palestine, and themes of anti-oppression, resistance and liberation.
All ticket proceeds will be going to charities:
The Ghassan Abu Sitah Children’s Fund
and emergency fundraiser for the Anbar family in Gaza City
www.tinyurl.com/anbarfam
SHORT FILMS FOR PALESTINE
Kunstparade
Maia Torp Neergaard | Denmark | 2024 | 9.00
Documenting the Art Parade in Copenhagen, a march of solidarity on Palestine’s Land Day 2024.
Reem Anbar / Beesan Arafat
Alex Grace | UK | 2024 | 04.00 & 04.00
Two documentary portraits on Palestinian diaspora artists working in Manchester, who use their creativity as a form of restistance and to preserve Palestinian culture: Reem Anbar, an oud player from Gaza City, and visual artist Beesan Arafat.
The Place that is Ours
Zena Agha & Dorothy Allen-Pickard | Palestine – UK | 2022 | 12.40
An exiled daughter of Palestine searches for traces of an obliterated past, returning to her father’s village which was destroyed in the Nakba of 1948. The hybrid documentary follows up on an ongoing research project by Palestinian-Iraqi writer, poet, and analyst Zena Agha. With filmmaker Dorothy Allen-Pickard, Agha distills the plight of Palestine into a series of maps that, when compared over the decades, reveal forgotten pasts and colonial ideations of the future.
The Place that is Ours trailer
Vibrations from Gaza
Rehab Nazzal | Palestine | 2023 | 16:17
Offers a glimpse into the experiences of deaf children in the besieged territory of Gaza, Palestine, particularly the violence to which they are subjected by Israeli military operations. Born and raised under the frequent onslaught of occupying forces, children recite vivid memories of their experiences of bombardment and the constant presence of military drones in their skies. The film also asks whether the children’s deafness is natural or a consequence of Israel’s use of sonic weapons.
Vibrations from Gaza trailer
It’s All One River
Nick Jordan & Fiona Brehony | UK | 2024 | 8.40
A film which features Palestinian oud player Reem Anbar performing an improvised version of her composition Nazih (Displacement), on the banks of the River Mersey in Manchester. Composed recently to highlight the plight of her family and fellow Palestinians in Gaza, Anbar’s highly evocative performance of Nazih agitates a symbiosis between the flow of water and the forced displacement of people, powerfully invoking the direct and personal experience of diaspora, exile and dispossession.
It’s All One River trailer
INTERMISSION
The Key
Rakan Mayasi | Palestine | 2023 | 19:00
An Israeli family’s equilibrium gradually disintegrates as a mysterious sound is heard every evening at the door of their apartment. The key, the central element of the film, represents the Palestinians’ right of return.
Based on the short story by Anwar Hamed, published in Palestine + 100, a collection of Palestinian sci-fi edited by Basma Ghalayini (Comma Press, 2019).
The Key trailer
Selfish Road
Oreet Ashery | Germany | 2022 | 30:48
Journeying through the artist’s homeland near Jerusalem, Ashery observes how these senses of belonging (of geographical place and of personal memory) have and continue to fuse with the vertiginous and winding flows of Israeli nation-building, the segregational infrastructure of apartheid and land use. With anger, grief, hope and resistance, it dreams of material ecological pathways for indigenous life away from the actions of settler occupation.
Selfish Road excerpt
