This week you are invited to the library of LUCA School of Arts, Sint-Lukas Brussels campus, where a scintillating collection of publications in the field of (audio)visual arts will be the backdrop of a film program of 16 millimetre experimental films by Len Lye, Babette Mangolte, Peggy Ahwesh, Jeff Keen and Paul Sharits. After the screening, the evening will continue with music and kinetic Scopitone films curated by Photokino.
The two other selected films of this week are reminiscences of Palestinian lives that are marked by expropriation and expulsion. The title of Lina Soualem’s film Bye Bye Tiberias (2023) refers to the village where her great-grandmother once lived, before being chased from her home in 1947. Lina’s mother is the actress Hiam Abbass, who took Lina swimming in Lake Tiberias when she was a small child, “as if to bathe me in her story,” she recalls. The film is a personal portrait of four generations of women, shaped by exile and memory.
Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction by Michel Khleifi takes place in the village Ma’loul, which was destroyed in 1948, also by the Israeli forces. Once a year, the former inhabitants are allowed to visit their village. During this day, older generations recount memories while children play among the rubble. As Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi wrote, “Alongside the static preservation of an enchanted past image, [the film] also excavates the layers of memory. Thus it transforms the static narrative of the past resurrected in the present into a story of the remembrance of the past, its recognition and processing, as a working through, as a stage toward a return to life in the present and its continued progression to the future.”
