Encounter: CONCERNING REVOLUTION. Session 1. Film screening + open discussion: R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity. Organised by Sarah Zeryab and  Lama El Khatib

 Date: Thursday, August 15th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00

Concerning Revolution is an invitation to gather around films, sounds, writings, and other formats. Taking these visual, sonic, or discursive contributions as entry points, each event of the series seeks to speak to the urgencies, questions, concerns, and confrontations that emerge from this moment’s heightened —  and globally expanded — formations of mass killing, repression, and policing. Neighbours, comrades, and friends are called on to join, share, and disseminate. The first session hosts a screening of R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity by Mohanad Yaqubi. The screening will be followed by an open discussion moderated by the organizers.

R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity 71 min / Japanese, Arabic, English

R21 comes as an addition to and a reflection on a collection of 20 16mm films, safeguarded in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine. It’s an undelivered solidarity letter written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during the film. R21 aka Restoring Solidarity acts as a catalog, the film as a time machine, the film as an archive. The themes that Reel no. 21 deals with, reveal themselves in the form of a montage essay. At the same time, the act of restoring these films brings out motives, aspirations, and the disappearance of a generation and its struggles, not only in Japan, but around the world.

BIO
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah- based production house, Idioms Film. Yaqubi is one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films that focuses on militant film practices, also, a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute, that focus on supporting, promoting, and preserving Palestinian cinema, he is a resident researcher at The School of the Art (KASK) in Gent, Belgium since 2017.   Image credit: Mohanad Yaqubi. Film Still from R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity, 2022

In collaboration with Archive Ensemble

Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin