SESSION 117, ILLEGAL _CINEMA

Screening of Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (Palestine, 1973, 13’) by Mustafa Abu Ali, UNDR (Palestine, 2024, 15’) by Kamal Aljafari, and A Night We Held Between (Palestine, 2024, 30’) by Noor Abed. Proposed by Nour Bishouty and Adrian Schindler, followed by a discussion.

Montage bears the contradiction of wholeness and rupture; it is at once a practice of dismantling and mending. The three films in this program mobilize distinct strategies for looking at and intervening in images. Each invites the viewer to recognize their role, alongside the filmmakers, in grappling with the inevitable disjointedness of Palestinian historiography. Dispossessed images, narratives, sites, gestures, and faces are reclaimed through choreographies of repetition and interruption, where fracture becomes both method and meaning.

In Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, Mustafa Abu Ali re-edits French news footage into a cinematically and politically subversive work. In UNDR, Kamal Aljafari appropriates archival aerial footage and reworks them into an unsettling meditation on the occupier’s ever-watchful eye. Finally, A Night We Held Between by Noor Abed centres on a song found in the archive of the Popular Art Centre Palestine, layering sound and site to conjure history as a collective present.

The films are presented free of charge courtesy of the filmmakers and the Palestine Film Institute. Donations to the Palestine Film Institute are encouraged: https://www.palestinefilminstitute.org/en/donate

Nour Bishouty and Adrian Schindler are the 2025 artists in residence at Bulegoa z/b.