Xenos (2012)

Documentary, 13 mins

In 2010, Abu Eyad and other young Palestinian men from the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon travelled with smugglers through Syria and Turkey into Greece. Like so many other migrants, they caame looking for a way into Europe but found themselves trapped in a country undergoing economic, political, and social collapse.

Xenos is a short documentary blending footage shot on visits to Athens in 2011 with phone conversations recorded during Abu Eyad's time there. It tells of his day-to-day struggle for survival and enduring sense of exile in a land of hope that has become a nightmare.

Director/Photographer: Mahdi Fleifel

Producer: Patrick Campbell

Editor: Michael Aaglund

Sound Designer: Gunnar Oskarsson

Featuring: Abu Eyad, Nizar, El-Yes, Muckhtar, Abu El-hob, El-khal, Abed M

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This month, the films of the Palestine Film Platform have been guest curated by Batool Batool Elhennawy of the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo. Between Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, this film program thinks through the zionist/imperialist threat of a “regional war” and the ways the zionist occupation of Palestine led to an intersectional history of resistance in the region. The films work with themes of inaccessibility, in location of filming, or visual language, due to regimes in the three countries, and by extension their relationship to the occupation. In two overlapping types of oppression, the program attempts to think of the complexity of liberation, and the images of resistance. Ones that document, maneuver, or navigate a political catastrophe (both the distinctive and the ongoing: the nakba, the genocide, or ongoing crimes of the occupation). While the history and news from the region intersect, each geo-political site is different. As we delve into the filmmakers’ stories, perhaps we see how far the distinction is essential to a unified cause. The sentiments are shared, and the goal of liberation is one, but the complexities speak volumes.

The films engage in one on one relationships and conversations, from seemingly private, or at least specific, encounters. These conversations lead us to think of the tools of cinema as a form of observation, and a mediator of experience, one that can redefine or interplay with the experience itself. In a time where we pay tribute on a daily basis to the images of resistance from inside Gaza, the West Bank, and South Lebanon, as well as think of the power an image can hold to divert an oppressive narrative, to speak truth, to break the definition of zionist time. We additionally think, can these moments of agency and clarity in a political story come to us quietly, often unnoticed? The Syrian post-revolutionary context adds a distinct timeline and spatiality of resistance. While we listen to the filmmakers and their subjects on site, as they share a camera, we hope to engage in the potential that telling a historical story has to accumulate within the discourse of liberation.

Batool Elhennawy is an artist and cultural programmer. She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University. She worked with the Cairo Institute for Arts and Sciences in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as doing research for art and culture institutions and projects. She participated in Spring Sessions residency (2017), The Lab Residency (2019) at Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan, and Arriving Elsewhere (2019) in Wadi Rum, Jordan, PS: Communitism (2023) in Athens, where she developed and exhibited work, and co-curated After Hours residency (2020) at Darat al Funun. She is currently working as a programmer at Contemporary Image Collective (CIC). Her practice revolves around working with theory to find starting points for projects that might take on other forms, with a focus on text, and (moving) image.