June

Reframing Time Through Images

How do we temporally situate Israel’s genocide on Palestinians in Gaza? Is it in the past, present, or future? As genocide transgresses the temporal boundaries imposed by so-called ceasefires, this program proposes reimagining our relationship to time through reimagining our relationship to images. The month-long program is split into three parts, loosely coinciding with past, present, and future. The first program is a series of experimental shorts of Gaza from 1973 onward that historicize images from Gaza and emphasize the experimentation involved both in creating images under systematic destruction and in perceiving and engaging with them. The second program, “Present Elsewheres,” explores the present across contradictory spaces, following characters attempting to negotiate meaning and possibility across these realities. The third program, “Inextinguishable Fires” (after Harun Farocki’s 1969 film), is a series of films on the “inextinguishable fires” of colonial violence and anticolonial struggle that propel toward futures beyond the frame of the screen. Through exploring themes of past, present, and future, the program questions temporal logics of linearity amid a genocide that was in the past, is in the present, and is extending into the future.

Selma Shaban is a filmmaker, curator, and researcher whose work focuses on anti-colonial film movements and on experimental approaches to creating liberatory moving-image practices. Most recently, she completed a Watson Fellowship where she researched and trained in film archiving practices across multiple countries in the Global South. Her work includes curating film programs and delivering talks in cities such as Amman, Beirut, Tunis, Dar Es Salaam, and Bangkok. During college, she organized screenings of Palestinian films and contributed to the collective making of the “Hani Jawharriyeh Cinema,” which she discusses in a chapter in an upcoming edited volume from the University of California Press. She graduated from college in 2024 with a double major in Philosophy and Islamic Studies, and she is currently based in Amman.