Film of the Week

Curated by Third Cinema Days

We open with a dialogue on the right to soil. Hamo Beknazaryan’s silent masterpiece depicts the industrial struggle for oil in the Caucasus, framing the earth as a site of collective labor and extraction. In contrast, Manna’s Foragers depicts the quiet, defiant labor of Palestinians gathering wild plants (Za'atar and Akkoub) in defiance of Israeli nature laws. Together, these films ask a fundamental question: Who owns the land? Is it the state that regulates and drills it, or the people who feed from it and live upon and with it?

The House on the Volcano (1928)

Drama | 1h 7m
Armenia/USSR

Petros, drill master at a Baku oil refinery, tells the story of the oil workers strike and its brutal suppression.  

Director: Hamo Bek-Nazaryan.
Screenplay: Bek-Nazaryan, P. Folyan
Starring: Hrachia Nersisyan, Tigran, Ayvazyan, Tatyana Makhmuryan

Feted as one of the preeminent Soviet filmmakers during the 1920s-1950s, the leading auteur of early Armenian cinema, Hamo Beknazaryan (1891-1965) has left an outstanding legacy of nearly three dozen feature and documentary films that has few parallels in Soviet film history. With major works shot in Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Beknazaryan was an epitome of cosmopolitan mentality and an ardent believer in cinema as a tool for cultural emancipation.

Foragers (2022)

Experimental | 1h 5m

Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further disposses them from their land while the occupation's state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

Directed and Produced by: Jumana Manna