Focus On This Land - Inas Halabi and Terrace of the Sea by Diana Allan

2023-06-04T15:30:00Z

Luminor Hôtel de Ville, 20 Rue du Temple, 75004 Paris, France

Focus On This Land This year, the festival follows the trail of the seeds, the plant gatherers, and probes in images and sounds the environmental and climatic impacts of colonization. This new edition of the FCP underlines the interweaving of ecological issues and the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. The films that make up the thread of our program criticize the way "scientific expertise" is used by the occupation to justify the grabbing and destruction of land. We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction by Inas Halabi Video Installation | 12 min | 2019 We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction has an outward subject and an inward one. Via a gear-shifting combination of conversation, interview and expressive location footage, it probes the possible burial of nuclear waste in the South of the West Bank. But as the footage cycles between fragmented conversations with a nuclear physicist and landscapes that are uneasily underscored by what we hear (and sometimes tinted an ill-omened red), another context emerges. In various ways, the delivery of information is thwarted, withheld, or delayed , and the film comes to turn on issues of representation and conveyance. The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, could be seen as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility – the systemic networks of power and control in the region – and this work as a meditation on how to account for the un-filmable but inexorable. Terrace of the Sea by Diana Allan Documentary | Palestine, Canada | 2009 | 52 min Filmed in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon, Terrace of the Sea uses a collection of family photographs taken over three generations as a prism through which to reflect on memory, loss and history.