Festivals and Events

Aljafari’s Port of Memory is the second instalment of a three part series entitled Recollective Resistance, serving as a witness to the destruction, repopulation, and gentrification of the once thriving Palestinian port city of Jaffa – now an extension of Tel Aviv. Using footage from imperialist–themed action films set in Jaffa, Aljafari provides us with a memoir of the everyday activities of a disappearing city that is bombarded by gentrification, re-construction and dispossession of its (…)

The Mole, (Yiling Ding, 2018) This short and enigmatic film is a glimpse into the life of a young masseur in Chinatown. A montage of moments in his working day at family-run Hong Ning Herbal Medicine, with voiceover narration in Chinese, proffers the tip of an iceberg, the scale and complexity of which is only made clear in the final shot. With all the reticence of an Imagist poem, the film leaves you deeply intrigued yet with the impression that it’s somehow said everything that needs (…)

Telling a friend where I was going on Wednesday, I had hesitated over the title – was it ‘London Lives, as in ‘many lives’, or could it be lives, as in ‘she lives’? After taking in these eight juxtaposed stories, I felt sure it was the former – the lives were multiple, intersecting but leading to completely distinct worlds, rather than coming together to form a unified and living whole. Their placement alongside each other felt more like counterpoint than synthesis. The films, curated from (…)

Gaza never falters in its intimate portrayal of humans whose lives have been profoundly affected by political decisions made without their consent or interests at heart. The footage is unmanufactured; it is not a passive news report about the body count of an active war zone but a real character study of personal and societal perseverance through the most devastating circumstances. It is both destruction and happiness; pain and dancing; and only political insofar as it spells out that (…)

The London Palestine Film Festival’s ‘Women of the Revolution’ event featured two films from female directors – both grainy but politically vital insights into the plight of Palestinians in the 1980s. The first, Layaly Badr’s Road to Palestine, served as a dark short with a long message – one of deep-rooted resistance and tragic injustices, a tale of Palestine’s reality for decades. The film, as a cartoon, burdens stick figures with the results of conflict and oppression, in the setting of (…)

The London Palestine Film Festival opened with an expectedly strong, but nonetheless captivating experience, screening Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven at the Barbican. The film’s protagonist leads a life by observation, with Suleiman playing himself - only presumably more silent and bemused. His quizzical looks throughout invite us to view the bizarre events before our eyes with a similar detached penetration, as Suleiman lives day to day in his home country, then to Paris and New York (…)

The Mayfair Hotel, where I’m about to meet Lynn + Lucy writer and director Fyza Boulifa and newcomer Roxanne Scrimshaw (Lynn), seems very far away from the film’s environment. Set in Harlow, the subtly dark and beautifully acted narrative follows two young mothers who have also been best friends all their lives, in spite (or maybe because of) their very different personas: Lucy the party animal, Lynn almost the wallflower. But when a tragic accident occurs and the local community reacts, (…)

Strange Cities Are Familiar, Dir. Saeed Taji Farouky At once lyrical and political, this film centres on a beautifully understated performance by Mohammad Bakri as Ashraf, a refugee living in London who is unable to return to Palestine to be with his dying son. Ashraf is both stern and tender as the London landscape around him transforms into scenes from his past life and the imagined sufferings of his son in the present. Featuring a brilliant use of sound from the outset the film is (…)

Normal is an experimental, non-fiction work, a series of observational vignettes displaying mundane actions carried out by men and women in Italy. Mum and baby fitness classes, hen dos, multiplayer video game sessions, performances of the rites of passage into adulthood that mark a woman’s femininity and a man’s masculinity. The film plays out chronologically. We start off with snapshots of kids undergoing their own initiations into their lives as a grown woman (having her ears pierced) and (…)

The 72nd Cannes Film Festival kicked off on Tuesday with its own brand of pomp and circumstance. Following a strong 2018 edition of the festival for Arab filmmakers, the 2019 line-up proved equally impressive. In the Un Certain Regard competition - headed by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, whose Capernaum won the Jury Prize last year - is Adam by Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani. The film, starring the ubiquitous and charismatic Lubna Azabal, is the story of a life-changing encounter (…)