IMAGES HIJACKING SCREENS FOR LIBERATION
Snapshots Reflecting Palestine (1973-2023)

Featuring: Mustafa Abu Ali, Basma al-Sharif, Arab Loutfi, Sami Al Salamoni, Mary Jirmanus Saba, and Tareq Rantisi. 

Curated by Ali Hussein AlAdawy

Screening Online: October 11 – 25, 2024
RSVP: artearchive.org
Available worldwide
FREE / $5 suggested donation

In-Person Screening: October 30, 6:45 PM
Address: Weis Cinema, Bard College
Screening introduced by Adam Haj Yahia and followed by a Q&A between Elizabeth Holt and Adam Haj Yahia
Open to all members of the Bard College community.

Program Overview:
Since 1969, striking iconographic imagery of the liberation of Palestine has emerged from the Palestinian resistance. From the hijacking of airplanes to the live-streaming of the Al-Aqsa flood, these images become instruments that seize newspaper headlines, media screens, and trends on social media platforms to work for the Palestinian cause. They fuel the hearts of international solidarity for liberation.

During the Cold War (1968-1982) when international solidarity between the developing world and the Palestinian cause grew, Palestinian filmmakers in collaboration with different arms of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) were producing militant films destined for resistance fighters in military camps, families in refugee camps, international solidarity campaigns, progressive political organizations, activists and finally, Arab and third-world solidarity film festivals and forums. Today and since October 2023, we can witness a similar trend with regards to content creators and filmmakers from Gaza whose imagery continues to interrupt Instagram’s rigidly controlled algorithms. Their content reveals the horrors of the Palestinian struggle for survival and an unfolding Genocide, which in turn, has led to the building of spontaneous and self-organized solidarity campaigns all over the world. 

IMAGES HIJACKING SCREENS FOR LIBERATION, is a film program consisting of three restored works from the film archives of the International Solidarity era and three contemporary works from post-Oslo era to the present. The program includes films by Mustafa Abu Ali, Basma al-Sharif, Arab Loutfi, Sami Al Salamoni, Mary Jirmanus Saba, and Tareq Rantisi. It explores the contexts of NGOization, donor political economy, the ideologies of human rights and contemporary art and the return of the humanitarian gaze within a dominant global economy.

IMAGES HIJACKING SCREENS FOR LIBERATION is curated by Ali Hussein AlAdawy and is presented by ArteEast. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from October 11 – 25.

Curatorial Text:
By Ali Hussein AlAdawy

“You are not defeated, so long as you resist.”
Mehdi Amel (1936-1987)

Since 1969, striking iconographic imagery of the liberation of Palestine has emerged from the Palestinian resistance. From airplane hijackings to the live-streaming of the Al-Aqsa flood, these images have become tools that seize newspaper headlines, media screens, and trends on social media platforms, working in service of the Palestinian cause. They ignite international solidarity movements for liberation (Yaqub 3).

During the Cold War (1968-1982), as international solidarity between the developing world and the Palestinian cause grew, Palestinian filmmakers, in collaboration with various arms of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), produced militant films. These films were intended for resistance fighters in military camps, families in refugee camps, international solidarity campaigns, progressive political organizations, activists, and eventually, Arab and third-world solidarity film festivals and forums. Today, since October 2023, we witness a similar trend among content creators and filmmakers from Gaza. Their imagery continues to disrupt Instagram’s tightly controlled algorithms, exposing the horrors of the Palestinian struggle for survival and the unfolding genocide. This, in turn, has sparked spontaneous and self-organized solidarity campaigns around the world.

The following film program consists of three restored works from the film archives of the International Solidarity era and three contemporary works from the post-Oslo era to the present. The program emerges within the context of NGOization, donor political economies, human rights ideologies, contemporary art, and the return of the humanitarian gaze within a dominant global economy.

In protracted catastrophic geopolitical contexts and genocidal times, the division between fiction and documentary is blurred, even reversed, when film archives are restored, recalled, and reactivated through recirculation. Fiction films often take on documentary qualities, while documentaries and film essays become haunted by historical ghosts, ultimately liberating imaginaries that resonate with the present.

The curatorial impetus for this film program stems from the provocation brought forth by restored film archives. Lessons are being drawn from the struggles of Gaza and the Palestinian resistance. Films emerge and reemerge from the archives, ultimately hijacking the social spaces of white cube exhibitions, international film festivals, academic symposia, film forums, and online platforms. The films reorient and instrumentalize these spaces to serve the interests of liberation.

The films in this program employ various experimental styles that evolved out of brutal necessity throughout different phases of the more than fifty-year struggle. Many of these films were developed independently through collective effort.

A pioneer of Palestinian militant cinema, Mustapha Abu Ali, part of the Palestinian Cinema Group (which became the Palestinian Cinema Institute in 1974), made Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza with the support of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, which was later damaged by Israel in 1982. Abu Ali uses found footage shot in Gaza under the supervision of the Israeli occupation forces, and with the use of the voiceover commentary, repurposes the images to work towards the Palestinian cause. The re-edited film becomes a tool in the Palestinian struggle against the Zionists on the battlefield (Habashneh 87).

Banned from writing in Cairo, Egyptian film critic and filmmaker Sami El Salamoni, with the support of the Nefertari Film Collective (El Shimi 71), made his film Cowboy using photo-motion style to introduce the figure of the Cowboy as the dominant visual of U.S. imperialism. The film connects this image, the quintessential model of settler colonialism that seized peoples, lands, and cattle, to the settler-colonial project of Zionism imposed by Hollywood mainstream cinema. Through editing, El Salamoni juxtaposes these images with those of the transnational solidarity movement and the struggles of third-world peoples.

In Kuneitra: Death of a City, we encounter a new emergence of forensic aesthetics. Here, genocides and genocidal violence are historically contextualized and framed as collective knowledge and responsibility for so-called “humanity.” Ruins, objects, and subjects are introduced as agents of truth, witnesses, and evidence through the collective labor of knowledge.

Jamila’s Mirror begins with footage from Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, highlighting the struggles of Palestinian women fighters against Zionist settler colonialism as echoes of Algerian women’s resistance against French colonialism. After Algeria’s independence, these women returned to traditional patriarchal roles. Among a group of Palestinian women fighters, the film raises the question of why women’s participation in the struggle has declined. Not only does it attribute this decline to sexual violence by Israeli occupation forces, but it also deconstructs the domestic space as a site of patriarchal division between care labor and women’s fight for emancipation. The film suggests that the domestic space, often considered invisible, is actually a workshop for self-reflection on the humanitarian gaze, struggle, memories, and becoming. Children are part of the image, and both care labor and the labor of struggle are rendered visible, echoing the image of a Palestinian woman holding her baby in one hand while throwing a stone with the other.

In Home Movies Gaza (2013), Basma AlSharif compiles footage she shot in 2012 in Gaza when it was under Israeli attack. Gaza, an open-air prison, had become a genocidal testing ground for American and European weapons. Yet the film still captures Gazans’ persistence in life through everyday observations—trivial home tasks, playing music, or memories of childhood games. These moments are disrupted and taken over by the Zionist project’s drones and the panic of airstrikes, a soundscape that contaminates and defamiliarizes ordinary life.

Finally, in Mahdi Amel in Gaza, the Palestinian Cinema Group and Palestine Research Center reappear. The filmmakers situate the genocide in Gaza within “the colonial mode of production,” a theoretical proposal by Lebanese Communist intellectual Mahdi Amel. They reflect on his legacy, connecting it to the genocide in Gaza and the current global ecological disaster by using found footage that positions Gaza and the Palestinian struggle far from abjection. The film raises critical questions, including one of the most urgent: What are our responsibilities toward the Palestinian struggle, which, while surviving genocide, remains at the heart of all struggles for justice and emancipation on Earth?

Works Cited

Yaqub, Nadia. Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. University of Texas Press, 2018.

Habashneh, Khadijeh. Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit. Springer International Publishing, 2023.

Shimi, Said. My Friend: Samy. Hala Publishing House, 2020. (In Arabic).

Film Program

Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973, Palestine, 13 mins and 43 secs.
Arabic with English subtitles

Synopsis:
A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing tech- niques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. The film won the prize as best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and was screened at multiple festivals. It was the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.

Cowboy, Sami Al Salamoni, 1973, Egypt, 16 mins.
Silent

Synopsis:
Cowboy begins from American cinema, as an exposure of the country’s settler colonial structure and its ability to depict genocidal acts through camera framing. The film, directed by the renowned Egyptian film critic Sami Al-Salamoni, reflects his theoretical critique of Hollywood through heavily edited scenes and shots from mainstream motion pictures. Al-Salamoni manages to take the audience through the history of commercialized image production towards a transnational solidarity image production as a response.

Kuneitra: Death of a City, Jim Cranmer, 1974, USA, 26 mins.
English, no subtitles

Synopsis:
Kuneitra: Death of a City was made by the American Peace Committee to document the UN-commissioned forensic investigation of the atrocities committed by the Israeli Army in the city of Kuneitra in the occupied Golan Heights. Shots of the remnants of destruction of religious sites, graveyards and homes interlace interviews that were made with the town residents and their recollections of what had happened.  

Jamila’s Mirror, Arab Loutfi, 1993, Palestine, 25 mins.
Arabic with English subtitles

Synopsis:
Jamila’s Mirror deals with the memories of Palestinian female guerilla fighters, currently in their forties, who were involved in military operations during their teen years.

Home Movies Gaza, Basma al-Sharif, 2013, Gaza, Occupied Palestine, 24 mins.
Arabic with English subtitles

Synopsis:
Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilisation. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.

Mahdi Amel in Gaza, Mary Jirmanus Saba & Tareq Rantisi, 2023, Palestine, 14 mins.
English and Arabic with English subtitles

Synopsis:
Assassinated Lebanese intellectual Mahdi Amel — often dubbed “the Arab Gramsci” — famously said: “He who resists is never defeated.” What use is his thought to us today, and what is our responsibility as image makers to Gaza?

Biographies:

Sami Al-Salamoni
Sami Al-Salamoni (1936-1991) was an Egyptian filmmaker and film critic who was a member of the New Cinema Society, founded in 1968. He directed several documentaries including “The Morning” (1982) and “The Moment” (1991).

Basma al-Sharif
Palestinian artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works. She received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, she was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023 and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024. Al-Sharif’s Major exhibitions include: De Appel, the Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Mondays at MOMA, CCA Glasgow, SALT Galata, the Whitney Biennial, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Berlin Documentary Forum, and Manifesta 8. Her films have screened in the international film festivals of Locarno, Berlin, Mar del Plata, Milan, London, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others. Basma is based in Berlin and represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris.

Mustafa Abu Ali
Mustafa Abu Ali (1940 in Maliha, Palestine – 30 July 2009 in Jerusalem, Palestine) was a Palestinian filmmaker.

Abu Ali studied at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1960s before studying cinema in London, graduating in 1967. One of the founders of Palestinian cinema under the auspices of the PLO, and the Palestinian Cinema Association in Beirut in 1973, (re-established in Ramallah in 2004), he wrote four screenplays and directed more than 30 films, for which he won more than 14 awards, the most recent from the 2003 Ismailia Film Festival.

Arab Loutfi
Arab Loutfi is a filmmaker, writer, and journalist. After working for many years on feature films with Mohammad Khan and Atef Altayeb,

she moved into the field of documentary filmmaking. Her first documentary, The Upper Gate, was an intensely personal account about Sidon, her hometown, in which she wove a history of the city through the stories of its people. Her second film, Jamila’s Mirror, dealt with the memories of Palestinian female guerrilla fighters, currently in their forties, who were involved in military operations during their teen years. Loufti’s subsequent works in filmmaking were Seven Nights and a Dawn, Rango, and The Egyptian Wedding. She later created the films Short Visit; Stories from Gaza; Bird of Prudence; Playing with Democracy; Dark Room, Radiant Life; Tell Your Tale, Little Bird; and Over Their Dead Bodies. In all her works, she attempts to show that by simply taking just two steps out of the world inhabited by the middle class and intellectuals, she can finds a life in which people have their own music, cultural tastes, and passions. She has also sat as a jury member in many film festivals including the Dubai Film Festival, Al Jazeera Film Festival, Docudays Film Festival, Ismailia Film Festival, Documentarist Film Festival, Alexandria Short Film Festival, and others. She is an active member of the Arab Documentary Filmmakers Union, as well as the Egyptian Film Critics Union.

Tareq Rantisi
Tareq Rantisi is a Grammy-nominated world percussionist, composer, and educator. He has performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in modern music including Luciana Souza, Aaron Goldberg, Jon Batiste, and as a member of Danilo Perez’s Global Messengers. Tareq began studying music while teaching in Palestinian refugee camps and community centers in the West Bank and Jerusalem. He joined other educators in 2011 to found the Edward Said Conservatory in Gaza, Gaza’s first music school. Tareq’s artistic practice engages with Arabic, Jazz, Afro-Cuban, Indian, West African, Brazilian, and embracing deep study of folk traditions evident in his debut album A’hajeez (Jafra Productions 2024).

Mary Jirmanus Saba
Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore the histories of labor movement in the Arab world and its connections to Latin America, feminist internationalism, and new transformative possibilities. Her feature debut A Feeling Greater Than Love won the FIPRESCI Critics Prize at the 2017 Berlinale Forum and went on to play hundreds of festivals, galleries, and community spaces — including Palestine solidarity encampments. Mary is a member of the Frantz Fanon Cultural Fund, the UAW Arab Caucus and the People’s CDC.