Still from Dancing Palestine

Reclaiming Rhythms استعادة الإيقاعات // followed by Q&A with director Lamees Almakkawy

Jumana Manna; Lamees Almakkawy | total Running time: 103m | book tickets

---

Two beautiful and powerful medium-length films exploring coloniality of archives, reclamation of Palestinian music and dance, and the violence inflicted by the Zionist project’s forced erasure of Arab Jewish identity. 

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me في اثر مادة سحرية

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me opens with a crackly voice recording of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music.

Over the course of the film Manna follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visit Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. Manna engages them in conversation around their music, while lingering over that music’s history as well as its current, sometimes endangered state. Intercutting these encounters with musicians, are a series of vignettes of interactions of the artist with her parents in the bounds of their family home.

In a metaphorical excavation of an endlessly contested history, the film’s preoccupations include: the complexities embedded in language, as well as desire and the aural set against the notion of impossibility. Within the hackneyed one-dimensional ideas about occupied Palestine, this impossibility becomes itself a trope that defines the Palestinian landscape.

director: Jumana Manna
Genre: Documentary
YEAR of release: 2015
Original Language(s): Arabic, English, Hebrew (English subtitles)
Age suitability: PG 
Content warnings: themes of cultural erasure

Dancing Palestine

To dance is to remember, to dance is to remind. As the Palestinian identity continues to be threatened with erasure, Palestinians turn to their folk dance, the dabke, as an homage to their history and culture, and to assert their existence. Dancing Palestine is a documentation of this embodiment of collective memory, as those who piece together a dabke choreography, piece together their identities, too. Together with the film - a performance in itself - the dabke is a testament to Palestinians’ deep love of life, and thus their need to contribute to the archive of Palestine, so that it continues to live on in the present.

director: Lamees Almakkawy
Genre: short, Documentary
year of release: 2024
Original Language(s): Arabic, English (English subtitles)
Age suitability: PG 
Content warnings: themes of cultural erasure

Events are ticketed but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please reach out.