Pleasure Dome co-presents two screenings of experimental work at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival at TIFF Bell Lightbox on September 28-29, 2024.
Part of Fall 2024
Pleasure Dome is pleased to co-present two screenings of films at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) at TIFF Bell Lightbox on September 28-29, 2024: Mohanad Yaqubi’s R21 Aka Restoring Solidarity (2022) and Kamal Aljafari’s Fidai Film (2024).
Kamal Aljafari, Fidai Film, 2024
When: Saturday, September 28 at 5:45pm ET
Where: TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St W, Toronto
Mohanad Yaqubi, R21 Aka Restoring Solidarity, 2022
When: Sunday, September 29 at 1:00pm ET
Where: TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St W, Toronto
A co-presentation by Pleasure Dome and the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF)
Praise for the films:
“Mohanad Yaqubi’s R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022) is a case of cinema as revolutionary practice. It is also a study of friendship and the quiet power of the archive. The twenty 16mm shorts that make up the film—newsreels and propaganda created between 1964 and 1983 in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and in Japan—were given to Yaqubi by scholar Aoe Tanami when the two met after a screening of the director’s earlier Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (2015). The films had been stored in Aoe’s home for decades as she awaited an occasion to offer them to a Palestinian filmmaker. In R21, she and Yaqubi talk briefly about the archive before the boxed-up reels are carried on a dolly to a restoration lab to be digitized and cataloged. Yaqubi screened all twenty films in their entirety at Documenta 15 and now, working with the editor Rami El Nihawi, has woven them into a concise but moving and alarmingly contemporary feature.” – Nicholas Gamso, for Screen Slate
“In the summer of 1982, the Israeli Army invaded Beirut and, while they were at it, looted the archives of the Palestine Research Centre. These archives contained numerous historical documents about Palestine, including an extensive collection of photographs and films. These images have since been re-named and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defence. Set against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the unperturbed violence of their authors), A Fidai Film proposes a counter-narrative of this loss, to restore the traces of Palestine’s pillaged history. Kamal Aljafari takes a fresh look at these images, here exclusively from film or television, and highlights the complexity of their status and their mode of existence as political objects. There is a twofold movement here, bringing these images back to life, sometimes as precious testimonies to the lives and struggles of the Palestinian people, but also rethinking the implicit viewpoint of those who produced them (the colonial gaze). Aljafari jumbles them up, sometimes mistreating them, to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticising regard and the actions of dispossession, by deleting the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British Mandate to the present day), adding, colouring, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining and editing them. A gesture of anger and struggle in action and a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film lays claim to a form of cinematographic sabotage, a resistance-fighter film as the title unequivocally indicates.” – Nicolas Feodoroff for FID Marseille
