“Provoked Narratives” is an invitation, in this time of genocide and ongoing aggression, to understand the narratives created around Palestine as part of a long colonial project, a blueprint of violence. To consider the ways in which the camera, since its very inception as a new tool, has played a conflicted role in the project of empire. To consider how images have been co-opted, and to see how images can also resist.
Today, in October 2024, as we mark a year since the start of the ongoing live-streamed genocide on Gaza, with violence escalating in the West Bank and into Lebanon, with frightening new strategies of destruction and a level of documentation and impunity never before seen, we feel compelled to look to the archive as an act of resistance.
“Provoked Narratives” presents films made from 1967 to 1984 in varying contexts and using different grammars of resistance, all live and resonant to this day. The programme reflects on the shifting gazes on the Palestinian struggle - from the humanitarian lens, to cinemas in solidarity and to the works of Palestinian filmmakers who devised new visual grammars in grief and in defiance. The films ponder questions of generational trauma and resistance, as well as the long history of solidarity between Palestine and Lebanon. This curation intends to enable learning, to stimulate discussion and action, to encourage viewers to build community, to gather around film screenings, and to support organizing and mobilizing.
PFI is a non-profit organization run by filmmakers on a voluntary basis; this programme has been curated in line with our mission to uphold Palestinian narratives as a commitment to a better future for the next generation. It is presented with the collaboration of Khadijeh Habashneh, the Jocelyne Saab Association, Third World Newsreels, Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement (AAMOD), Nadi Lekol Nas, Subversive Film, United Screens for Palestine and the Network of Alternative Arab Screens (NAAS). With gratitude to all who have enabled this programme, and in solidarity.
- The PFP team
