Landed Reel-ations is a film program centring the land question in South Africa and Palestine. The films – some produced by militants in the 1970s and 1980s, and others from the contemporary moment – engage with settler ideologies, land dispossession and indigenous modes of relating to the land. Drawing on the shared and ongoing histories of colonialism and solidarity between South Africa and Palestine, the programme deepens our understanding of land as a relation to consider practices of anticolonial resistance and liberatory futures.
Last Grave at Dimbaza
Nana Mahomo, Chris Curling, Pascoe Macfarlane, 1974, 42′
In English
In 1969, a small group of South African exiles and British film students formed Morena Films in London to produce films about the apartheid. In 1974 they produced one of the first, and certainly the most influential, films about apartheid. Last Grave was shot clandestinely in South Africa and smuggled out of the country—had an enormous impact on global opinion at a critical moment in the struggle against apartheid, revealing to audiences worldwide the shocking inequalities between whites and blacks in South Africa. This documentary exposé is now a rare, primary visual resource, a portrait of a time and place that was largely unrecorded by photographs or film. Filmed throughout South Africa, from Capetown to Johannesburg, as well as in the surrounding black townships and the desolate bantustans, Last Grave visually portrays the stark contrasts between living and working conditions for the majority populace of 18 million blacks and the 4 million whites who rule over them. In addition to revealing the migratory labor system, which separates black families for most of the year, and a repressive passbook policy to control black workers’ movements, the film examines the gross inequities in such areas as housing, education, health care, industry, and agriculture.
Scenes of Occupation from Gaza
Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973, 13’
In Arabic with English subtitles
A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. The film won the prize as best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and was screened at multiple festivals. It was the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.
What the Soil Remembers
José Cardoso, 2023, 29’
In English
In 1960s South Africa, a close-knit community from Die Vlakte was forcibly and violently uprooted to make way for the Stellenbosch University as part of the Apartheid regime’s segregation measures. José Cardoso’s What the Soil Remembers recounts the traumatic effect displacement had on residents by bringing to the foreground a university that is still grappling with its racist legacy. To this day, the Die Vlakte community is fighting for justice and seeking reparations with little to no tangible solutions.
Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction
Michel Khleifi, 1985, 30’
In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles
For a long time, the original inhabitants of the Galilean village of Ma’loul, destroyed by Israel after the 1948 War, were only allowed to visit their old village once a year, on Israel’s Day of Independence. The film follows them on that day and reveals a world of painful memories and the villagers’ profound determination to cling to their ancestral land. Village elders recall the destruction of both their property and harmonious way of life, as youngsters scramble to savour and absorb their forbidden heritage in a single, precious day. lntercut with these scenes, a teacher in a Palestinian classroom explains to his teenage students the history of Palestine, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
Conceived by United Screens for Palestine, the programme is open to all and features screenings and discussions with Asher Gamedze, Omar Jabary Salamanca and Reem Shilleh. The program will take place on Saturday 11 between 13:15 and 16:15 in Zaal 2 of the Slachtstraat Filmtheater, Utrecht.
More infos: https://leguesswho.com/lineup/film-united-screens-for-palestine?referrer=lineup