Document 2018 - Document Film Festival

Document x Dardishi | Publication

In celebration of the pioneering women of Arab cinema we are producing a publication with our friends at Dardishi, consisting of words and images from Palestinian women that reflect on the idea of a Palestinian archive, particularly from a feminist point of view. They explore the breadth and diversity of an archive might be, what forms it might take, and how it might relate to the preservation of histories, cultures and identities that exist under conditions of exile and occupation.

The publication will be available throughout the festival weekend, with proceeds going towards Dardishi Festival 2019.

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Dardishi Festival is a community-run festival that celebrates and showcases Arab and North African women’s contributions to contemporary art and culture // 8-10 March 2019.

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Spell Reel

A collective film assembled by Filipa César.

In 2011, an archive of film and audio material re-emerged in Bissau. On the verge of complete ruination, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of Amílcar Cabral, the liberation leader assassinated in 1973. In collaboration with the Guinean filmmakers Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, and many allies, Filipa César imagines a journey where the fragile matter from the past operates as a visionary prism of shrapnel to look through. Digitised in Berlin, screened and live commented, the archive convokes debates, storytelling, and forecasts. From isolated villages in Guinea-Bissau to European capitals, the silent reels are now the place from where people search for antidotes for a world in crisis.

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Presented in partnership with Goethe-Institut Glasgow.

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Revenir

Part road-trip, part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Revenir follows Kumut Imesh, a refugee from the Ivory Coast now living in France, as he returns to the African continent and attempts to retrace the same journey that he himself took when forced to flee civil war in his country – this time with a camera in his hand.

Traveling alone, Kumut documents his journey both as the main protagonist in front of the camera, as well as the person behind it, revealing the human struggle for freedom and dignity on one of the most dangerous migratory routes in the world. Revenir depicts a courageous journey and a unique collaboration between filmmaker and refugee; which is not without consequences.

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Presented in partnership with GRAMNet.

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Meteors

At night, in a Kurdish town in eastern Turkey, meteors start to fall. Stepping out of their homes to look, the city’s inhabitants encounter fragments of the past and remember those who have been lost. In this environment, the tracing of absences becomes both an imaginative and a political act; the impact of the violence which has scarred the area has been erased from official records, leaving memories and stories to fill the gaps.

Focusing on the troubled history of this conflict-stricken area, Meteors deftly interweaves its cosmological framework with astute political commentary, exploring the ethics of how we remember the stories, places and voices which have disappeared.

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Orione

The death of Alejandro “Ale” Robles, killed by police after being betrayed by a friend, provides the throughline for this nuanced, fragmentary portrait of the Don Orione estate in Buenos Aires. In a small apartment his mother, Ana, bakes a cake and recalls her son whilst home video footage captures the family in happier times.

Through the deft assembly of different types and sources of footage, Bonino weaves together disparate elements of neighbourhood life to construct a multi-layered work that coalesces to form an aching and disquieting portrait of a society spilling over with contradictions and irreconcilable truths.

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Kings & Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image

Palestinian director Azza El Hassan embarks on an intriguing, moving and sometimes humorous road-trip on the trail of a lost archive of films made by the PLO Media Unit, which went missing during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. The film stock documents 25 years of Palestinian history – often denied or ignored – including the moment of civilian expulsion that occurred during the Six Day War of 1967 and the PLO’s activity in Lebanon up until 1982.

She travels through Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, following the contradictory and often confusing clues as to the archive’s whereabouts, all the while prompting a deeper reflection on Middle East politics, Arab life, and the question of what a Palestinian identity means today.

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A.K.A. Serial Killer

A milestone in the history of political and experimental cinema, A.K.A. Serial Killer pioneers the cinematic theory of fûkeiron (the theory of landscape). Together with cultural theorist Matsuda Masao, scriptwriter Sasaki Mamoru and other collaborators, Adachi set out to trace the likely steps of a nineteen-year-old boy who carried out four, apparently motiveless, murders over a month-long period in 1968.

The result is an experimental documentary comprised purely of landscape shots, each of which shows scenery that he may or may not have seen during his upbringing and journey. Seeking an alternative to the sensationalism found in the media, Adachi’s sparse voice-over provides only the hard facts while the increasing number of billboards in the landscapes slowly reveal the hegemony of capitalism in contemporary Japan.

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Followed by a Skype conversation with Julian Ross, researcher, writer, and curator for International Film Festival Rotterdam. Julian has also written a programme note to accompany the screening.

Supported by the BFI and BFI’s Film Audience Network as part of “Uprising: Spirit of ‘68”

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Chaos

“What does it actually mean to describe the whole of society, the state of an era’s consciousness? It doesn’t mean to repeat the words that society uses; it has to be depicted in a different way. And it has to be depicted in a radically different way, because otherwise nobody will ever know what our time was like.”

This quote from Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann provides the conceptual framework for Sara Fattahi’s devastating meditation on the war in Syria, as experienced by three women living in exile. The women live in different places, from Damascus to Vienna, but Fattahi binds them together in a cinematic conversation that speaks to the complexity of personal and collective trauma, what it means to live in exile, and the cognitive dissonance that governs the way we perceive conflict. It is a conversation between the interior and exterior – an impossible conversation.

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Director Sara Fattahi will take part in a post-screening Q&A.

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The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images

Anabasis – The name given to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.

Developed in collaboration with legendary filmmaker Adachi Masao, The Anabasis… re-purposes Adachi’s theory of fûkeiron to explore the history of the Japanese Red Army, their exile in Beirut and ultimately their forced return to Japan.

Shot in glorious Super 8mm, Baudelaire traces the disjointed stories and entangled recollections of Fusako Shinegobu, leader and founder of the JRA; her daughter, May; and Adachi Masao, filmmaker-turned-revolutionary fighter. Panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut merge with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts to create a beautiful and poignant exploration of the slippages between history, memory, politics and cinema.

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The Sun Quartet

How do forty-three students vanish into thin air? Produced by an anonymous Mexican collective, The Sun Quartet is an experimental, at times psychedelic protest-poem addressing the legacy of the 2014 disappearance of forty-three students in Iguala, Guerrero. Across four visually striking and emotionally potent short films, the collective radically depart from the grammar of mainstream film and television, which, along with the obfuscation of the state, police and military continues to fail victims of violent crime in Mexico. The Sun Quartet finds them instead reaching towards a more authentic language capable of articulating the trauma at the heart of the national psyche.

The whereabouts of the disappeared students remain unknown, and their status as ‘disappeared’ persists to this day.

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Please note that the film is composed largely of overlaid moving images that at times create a strobe-like effect.

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2018

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Document x Dardishi | Publication

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Spell Reel

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Revenir

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Meteors

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Orione

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Kings & Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image

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A.K.A. Serial Killer

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Chaos

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The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images

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The Sun Quartet

Please note that the film is composed largely of overlaid moving images that at times create a strobe-like effect.

Info

Films