re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 4: Jocelyne Saab + Basma Al-Sharif, 113' ―
Guest curated by: Kaleem Hawa

Jocelyne Saab’s challenging and complicated late film Once Upon a Time in Beirut (1995), attempts to make sense of Arab image-making after the formal conclusion of the Lebanese civil war. In the film, Yasmine (Michèle Tyan) and Leila (Myrna Makaron) ride in a taxicab to visit the mysterious Monsieur Farouk (Emile Accar), an aging projectionist inspired as a child by silent films and Westerns to run several cinemas across Beirut. He welcomes them and leaves them to explore his archive, seemingly of every film ever made of Lebanon: “They told us you were Beirut’s living memory,” the girls say among the celluloid.

What ensues is a montage of scenes from more than thirty films spanning a century of cinema, culled from about four hundred collected for the project, with Yasmine and Leila occasionally inserted in asides to offer homilies on love or history. The scenes Saab selected flood the eye: the corniche, the aerodrome, wake surfers dragged by motorboats; leather merchants and colonial soldiers with orders; forbidden loves with Bedouin beys or gangsters; seductions, trysts, funerals, and marriages across musicals, melodramas, and spy thrillers; the 1930s and 1950s and 1960s draped in Fairuz, Farid al-Atrash, and Serge Gainsbourg.

The screening will be preceded by the Basma al-Sharif short
O, Persecuted (2014), which is a recovery and adaptation of Kassem Hawal’s Our Small Houses (1974), a resistance film that had been presumed to be lost. A discussion will follow, focused on both the strengths and limitations of Saab’s film, critiques of its politics, and an assessment of its intervention into questions of spectacle and the image in Lebanon. -Kaleem Hawa

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Indoor Screening
29 April 2024 · 7:00pm screening
Gallery TPW · St. Helen's Avenue, Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

کان یا مکان، بیروت ( Il était une fois Beyrouth, histoire d’une star) (Once Upon A Time: Beirut, the History of a Star)·
Jocelyne Saab O,Persecuted · Basma al-Sharif

O, Persecuted

Directed by Basma al-Sharif
Palestinian Territories/UK · 2014 · 12'00

Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

She received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, she was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023 and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024.

Al-Sharif’s Major exhibitions include: the Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Mondays at MOMA, CCA Glasgow, the Whitney Biennial, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Berlin Documentary Forum, and Manifesta 8. Her films have screened in the international film festivals of Locarno, Berlin, Mar del Plata, Milan, London, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris.

Kaleem Hawa is a Palestinian writer and organizer. He has curated film programs with Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), Light Industry (Brooklyn, NY) and Maysles Documentary Center (Harlem, NY).