February
Cinematic Resonances and Solidarity between Latin America and Palestine
For many years, cinema has played an important role in the relations between Latin America and Palestine.
Over four weeks, this program - curated by Geraldo de Campos and Christian Mouroux for the LatinArab International Film Festival - highlights some pieces within the deep connections between Latin American cinema and the Palestinian struggle, questioning how filmmaking might become a practice of liberation and global solidarity . These contemporary documentaries refuse, in different cinematic aesthetics, the erasure of Palestinian existence.
Before the existence of decolonial or post-colonial theories, and beyond the concepts of "Third World" and "Global South", people were already moving between Palestine, Chile, Egypt, Argentina, Lebanon , Brazil, in the beginning of the 20th century and making films. The production and mobility of images was relevant to pave the cultural entanglements related to the history of migration between the regions. In the end of 1960’s Palestine became a vital threshold in this history.
The films "This is Beit Sahour" (Fernanda Chain), "East Wind" (Maia Gattas), "Hamule, the Memory of Exile" (Mauricio Misle), and "The Color of Olives" (Carolina Rivas) compose a recent cinematic dialogue that connects Palestinian displacement, exile, and struggle with Latin American experiences of dictatorship, disappearance, and uprootedness.
From Buenos Aires to the West Bank wall, passing through Chile and Mexico, the selected films document the political force of memory reconfiguring geographies as individual grief mirrors collective dispossession. And above all, how cinema and poetry are still able to whisper the sound of time as part of a global call for solidarity and action.
