memory/oral recollections

Experimental | 13 min.

The title Mnemosyne is borrowed from the Titan goddess of memory and the inventress of language and words. The starting point for the film is a scar on the forehead of the artist’s grandfather, the result of a bullet shot in his direction by Zionist forces in the late 1940s. Focusing on the sagas of myth and the construction of memory, members of the same family are filmed individually as they narrate their version of the same event. By scratching the surface of family history, the film explores the scar as a foundational hinge that arranges reality. The project also considers how one can play the role of a historian when the primary source is no longer there. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. As such, recollection becomes an act of transformation rather than reproduction.

Director: Inas Halabi

Experimental | 23 min.

Excerpts from two conversations, one with Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in Bourg al Barajinah refugee camp, near Beirut), and the other with Nameh Hussein Suleiman (in Baddawi refugee camp, near Tripoli, Lebanon), two elder Palestinians that have been living in the camps in Lebanon since they were children, forced to flee from their homes in Palestine in 1948. They discuss their displacement and the condition of their lives in a brutal permanent temporariness. Abdel Majid discusses issues of dispossession, and recites an eloquent poem told by the ruins of his house in Palestine where once he was allowed visit after his first 30 years of forced absence, and Nameh recounts her journey of exile and the present situation of her life.

Director: Jayce Salloum