For Episode 9 of our Cinematic Dialogs series, directors Azza El Hassan and Mohanad Yaqubi discuss the intersection of militant cinema and archival practice in the documentary field. This conversation was streamed live on the Palestine Film Institute Facebook page on Sunday July 24th at 7pm.
Azza El Hassan is a filmmaker and the winner of various international film awards such as, The Aleph Documentary Award, Luchino Visconti Award, Jazeera Jury Award and the prestigious Grierson Award. Azza has a special interest in the use of visual archive, in films, by nations who’s archive has been destroyed or abducted. In 2019, she founded The Void Project, a multi media art project, that aims to restore archival films, curate exhibitions and produce narratives that centres around archive and the effect of their abduction on narratives.
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production house Idioms Film. He is the director of the archival films Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victor (2016) and Tokyo Reels AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022) . With Reem Shilleh, he founded Subversive Film in 2011, a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices. He is also a researcher at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Gent.
