Razan al-Salah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. She often works with sound-images to infiltrate borders that have severed us from the land. Her films are both ghostly trespasses, and seeping ruptures, of the colonial image that functions as a border, as a wall. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects and sounds. These relations become different points of entry and exit into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.  

Kamal al-Jafari is a Palestinian filmmaker renowned for his distinctive approach to cinema. After studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, he now resides in Berlin, Germany. al-Jafari has shared his expertise in filmmaking through teaching positions at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. His contributions to the field were recognised with fellowships at the Film Study Center – Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and most recently at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University 2024–2025. 

In May 2024, IndieLisboa will highlight his contributions to cinema by dedicating its retrospective section to his work, to take place at the Portuguese cinematheque. Additionally, his installation “The Camera of the Dispossessed” was showcased at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023). His film, A Fidai Film, won the grand jury prize at Visions du Réel 2024. He is currently developing a fiction film set to be shot in Jaffa. 

Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

Sarah Maldoror was born in 1939 in Candou, France. A Guadeloupean of African descent, she is respectfully regarded as the matriarch of African cinema (she was the first woman of color to make a feature film). For her, filmmaking was a weapon for struggle and liberation from the very beginning of her experiences in cinema. Though before embarking on a career in filmmaking she co-founded the theatre group Compagnie d’Art Dramatique des Griots in Paris in 1956. She left the company in the early 1960s to study cinema in the Soviet Union at VGIK in Moscow on a scholarship—there she met Ousmane Sembène who was also studying at the time. Maldoror worked both as an assistant director and a director in Paris, Martinique, and Portuguese-speaking African countries. After residing briefly in Morocco in 1963, she went to Algeria to work as Gillo Pontecorvo’s assistant on the 1966 classic film, The Battle of Algiers, the prototype for all mainstream political cinema of the 1970s. Her 1968 debut film Monagambée, which examines torture techniques used by the French in the Algerian war, was selected for the Quinzaine des réalisateurs / Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 1971. The following year she made her emblematic œuvre, Sambizanga, which relates a woman’s experience during the Angola liberation struggle. The film shared the prestigious Tanit d’Or prize at the Carthage Film Festival that same year. Pioneer, trailblazer, mentor, Sarah Maldoror had this to say in an interview with Jadot Sezirahiga: “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about their problems”. Maldoror's work is often included in studies of the role of African women in African cinema. Maldoror passed away in France in April 2020, at the age of 90, from COVID-19.

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulated widely at film festivals and art institutions across the world, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DocLisboa, Viennale, BlackStar Film Festival, Open City Docs, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, Criterion Collection, and many more.

Isaac Sherman is a filmmaker, musician, projectionist and woodworker currently living in Los Angeles, California. His work is informed by direct engagement with the medium, dissecting frames, manipulating and obscuring the lens, rephotographing, hand-processing. He focuses largely on his immediate surroundings, prioritizing subjects and topics that feel inherently close. His work has been exhibited at festivals including Prismatic Ground, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads and Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. 

Nehal Vyas is a film and video artist from India, currently based in LA. Her films are a mixture of documentary and fiction, using experimental techniques and mythological storytelling inspired by her grandmother’s way of storytelling. Her work implores questions of nation-states, the collective struggles towards decolonization, notions of global solidarity, and allyship through image-making. She stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine.

1:00 PM PROGRAM

Monangambee, Sarah Maldoror. Algeria, 1968, b&w, sound, 18 mins. Provided by Les Amis des Sarah Maldoror & Mario de Andrade

During a prison visit, a woman confides a promise to her husband, setting the stage for an unexpected chain of events. Tragically, a sentinel's misconstrued perception ignites a calamitous sequence, subjecting the couple to the harrowing ordeals of interrogation and torment. This narrative, co-written by the filmmaker’s then-husband, Mário Pinto de Andrade, poignantly illustrates the consequences of a misread intention, unraveling lives through a cruel twist of fate, underscored by music from the influential Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The Return of Amílcar Cabral (O regresso de Amílcar Cabral), Djalma Fettermann, Flora Gomes, José Bolama, Josefina Crato, Sana na N'Hada. Guinea-Bissau, Sweden, 1976, transfer to digital, color, sound, 32 mins. Film provided by Arsenal.

The first production by Guinean filmmakers after the liberation from Portuguese colonialism in 1974, O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral documents the transferral of the remains of Amílcar Cabral from Conakry (where he was assassinated in January of 1973) to Bissau in 1976. An intriguing coverage of the solemn event, recordings of Guinean songs, and archive footage of Cabral during the guerrilla war pay tribute to the political thinker and freedom fighter. (DocLisboa)

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), Suneil Sanzgiri. India/USA, 2023, 16mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 35 mins. New film!

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) is an ongoing project focusing on interwoven narratives around the mutual struggle against Portuguese colonialism between India and Africa, and the bonds of solidarity that developed between the two continents. Told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives, Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) utilizes a blend of CGI animation, super 16mm film, and hand-processed and destroyed archival film to uncover lost layers of world-building, kinship, and the material and immaterial network of relations that developed between historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.

A woman’s dreams become haunted by a mythological titan from Portuguese mythology called the Adamastor—a giant storm cloud formed on the Cape of Good Hope who sought to destroy Vasco de Gama’s ship and prevent him from ever reaching India. Repurposed from Portugal’s oldest work of epic poetry, Os Lusíadas, the Adamastor becomes a figure of refusal but also of failure, as the woman who is haunted by the monstrous storm cloud’s presence in her nightmares recounts through monologues to the monster the ethno-nationalist violence taking hold in the aftermath of decolonization.

Read more about the film, and its material connections to the liberation of Palestine, here. 

Program followed by a conversation with Inney Prakash and Suneil Sanzgiri.

4:00 PM PROGRAM

Capital, Basma al-Sharif. Egypt/Italy, 2023, Digital, color, sound, 17 min., Los Angeles Premiere 

A ventriloquist walks into a bar and orders a stiff drink.

The Bartender asks: Will that be all?

The Dummy answers: Does it look like I can speak with this hand up my ass?

As Egypt syncs further into poverty and is overwhelmed by debt, new cities are being erected across the country and prisons fill with dissenting opinions. But who are these cities for and what desire or ambivalence do they inspire—and at what cost? Since it is currently not possible to safely speak about this, a ventriloquist, songs, and advertisements describe a seemingly bygone era of fascism.

Referencing Telefoni Bianchi films, a precursor to propaganda cinema under Mussolini, the legacy of building new capitals provides the material to express opinions and hope through satire. (Basma al-Sharif)

Amma ki Katha, Nehal Vyas. USA, 2023, color, sound, 21 mins.

India—my nation—is being rebuilt. Her foundation is being laid on the imagined land that claims to be the birthplace of my grandmother’s God. In the mythology that she passed down to me during many summer nights, her God was magical, kind, imaginative and democratic—just like my India was supposed to be. But today, through its many retellings and reimaginings, the tale is being used as a political tool to manifest the violent desire of a Hindutva state. This film attempts to remember—as well as dream—a forgotten nation. (Nehal Vyas)

A Stone’s Throw على مرمى حجر’, Razan al-Salah. 2024, color, sound, 40 min., Los Angeles premiere

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labor. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. A Stone’s Throw trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labor in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil laborers of Haifa blew up a BP pipeline. (Razan al-Salah)

Program followed by a conversation with Inney Prakash, Nehal Vyas, and Razan al-Salah.

RECEPTION/BAR OPEN!

7:30 PM PROGRAM

A Shifting Pattern, Isaac Sherman. 2023, 16mm, color, sound, 6 mins., Los Angeles premiere! 

A collected geography of local flowers; appearing, disappearing, reappearing. Afterimage becomes before-image, physiology and pathology at play. An ode to the neighborhood, an entrapment that offers small opportunities for escape. The will to walk aimlessly is rejuvenated, as stasis turns to movement and back again. (Isaac Sherman)

*Please note* this film contains some strobing images.

Special Preview Screening of a new film by Kamal al-Jafari. Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brasil, France, 2024, digital, color, sound, 78 min. 

About our co-presenter

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2024 is their 49th year.