SRFF 2024: DOUBLE BILL — PROGRAMME AT A GLANCE 

 

 

Online overture
October 11–20
︎ Grand Union website, Birmingham

ONE’S CONNECTION IS ANOTHER’S DIVISION: COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND PALESTINЕ︎ 

37 mins

SEBASTIA DISAGREEMENT (2023) dir. Yiru Qian (15 mins)
A PASSAGE (2019) dir. Felix Kalmenson & Rouzbeh Akhbari (22 mins)

︎ Watch here

Opening night
Thursday, October 17
︎ 18:00-21:00
︎ Screen 3 at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry 

QUEER ARCHIVES AND REENACTMENTS IN LEBANON AND BRAZIL + Q&A︎

 
NEO NAHDA (2023) dir. May Ziadé (12 mins)
CASA IZABEL (2022) dir. Gil Baroni (85 mins)

︎ Tickets

Friday, October 18
︎ 18:00-20:40
︎ Coventry Transport Museum

RAILROADS AND COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND IRAN + Q&A︎

A STATE IN A STATE (2022) dir. Tekla Aslanishvili (46 mins)
SCENES OF EXTRACTION (2023) dir. Sanaz Sohrabi (43 mins)

︎ Tickets

Saturday, October 19
︎ 14:00-17:00
︎ Cinema at MAC Birmingham

PALESTINIAN-UKRAINIAN SOLIDARITY SCREENING 1: COLLECTING STORIES, PRESERVING CULTURE + Q&A︎

DANCING PALESTINE (2024) dir. Lamees Almakkawy (37 mins)
WEIGHTLESS (2023) dir. Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas (70 mins)
+ Q&A (60 mins)
+ after-screening reception (17:00-18:00)

︎ Tickets

Saturday, October 19
︎ 18:00-21:00
︎ Cinema at MAC Birmingham

PALESTINIAN-UKRAINIAN SOLIDARITY SCREENING 2: SCRUTINISING THE ENEMY + Q&A︎

PARADISO, XXXI, 108 (2022) dir. Kamal Aljafari (18 mins)
INTERCEPTED (2024) dir. Oksana Karpovych (95 mins)
+ Q&A (60 mins)
+ pre-screening reception (17:00-18:00)

︎ Tickets

Sunday, October 20
︎ 14:00-17:00
︎ Theatre at MAC Birmingham

GENOCIDE, DISPLACEMENT, AND FAMILY HISTORIES IN ETHIOPIA AND ARMENIA + Q&A︎

THE MEDALLION (2023) dir. Ruth Hunduma (19 mins)
1489 (2023) dir. Shoghakat Vardanyan (76 mins)

︎ Tickets

Closing night
Sunday, October 20
︎ 18:00-20:30
︎ Theatre at MAC Birmingham

KORYO-SARAM AND CHINESE LIVERPUDLIANS: STORIES OF EAST ASIAN FORCED DISPLACEMENT IN THE USSR AND THE UK + Q&A︎

THE UNDESIRABLES (2022) dir. Hester Yang (19 mins)
THREE BORDERS (2017) dir. Alisa Berger (55 mins) 

︎ Tickets

Online overture
October 11-20
︎ Grand Union website, Birmingham

ONE’S CONNECTION IS ANOTHER’S DIVISION: 
COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND PALESTINE

SEBASTIA DISAGREEMENT by Yiru Qian (15 mins)
A PASSAGE by Felix Kalmenson & Rouzbeh Akhbari (17 mins)

︎ Watch here

Screening Rights Film Festival 2024: DOUBLE BILL, taking place over the weekend of 17-20 October in Birmingham and Coventry, will be preceded by an online overture hosted by the Birmingham-based arts initiative Grand Union. This will be available on the Grand Union website immediately before and during the festival, from 11 to 20 October. The screening of two short films aims to broaden the context of the in-person events, as well as extend their outreach.

Titled ONE’S CONNECTION IS ANOTHER’S DIVISION: COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND PALESTINE and featuring Sebastia Disagreement by Yuri Qian and A Passage by Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari, the overture deepens the festival’s engagement with the industrial heritage of the Midlands while also resonating formally and thematically with multiple festival titles.

In particular, it serves as a continuation of a screening on railroads and colonial infrastructures in South Caucasus and Iran, hosted at the Transport Museum in Coventry on 18 October. It also connects with two Palestinian-Ukrainian solidarity screenings (1 and 2), taking place at MAC Birmingham on 19 October, and an event focused on genocide, displacement, and family histories in Ethiopia and Armenia, also at MAC Birmingham, on 20 October.

The overture is designed to give guests a glimpse of the broader programme and to convey the concept behind DOUBLE BILL through a concise and evocative experience lasting about half an hour.

SEBASTIA DISAGREEMENT
Yiru Qian / 2023 / UK / 15’ / Arabic, English with written English

Through highly inventive methods of physical and immaterial visualisation — digital 3D models and screen capture, as well as miniaturised re-enactments using hands, maps, gypsum models, and even puppetry, with marionette oranges serving as stand-ins for the legendary Jaffa fruit — filmmaker-researcher Yiru Quan unpacks the zionist occupation of Masudiya and Sebastia stations, once crucial sites for Palestinian agricultural activities and historically important transit points on the Hejaz railway, which connected cities across North Africa and the Middle East.

A PASSAGE
Felix Kalmenson & Rouzbeh Akhbari / 2019 / Armenia / 17’ / Armenian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles 

Oil trucks with Farsi on them, a children’s choir singing in Armenian, an Armenian man singing about the now-discontinued Yerevan-Baku railway in Russian, and the haunting, enigmatic images of two horsemen with mirrors for faces, who search for wind as if to help a nowhere-to-be-seen plane take off and carry a ghostly image of a train through a derelict Soviet-era tunnel — the Meghri region in southern Armenia, which borders Azerbaijan, emerges as a territory in-between languages, cultures, temporalities, and, as discussed by radio hosts in Mandarin Chinese and Russian in the background, neoimperialist geopolitical interests in the South Caucasus and the Middle East.

Yiru Qian is an architect and visual artist who currently lives and works in London. Influenced by her interests in architectural design, archival research, and the archaeology of knowledge, she explores historical narratives that traverse time and space through imagery, mapping, and making.

Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies.

Opening night Thursday, October 17
︎ 18:00-21:00
︎ Screen 3 at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry

QUEER ARCHIVES AND REENACTMENTS
IN LEBANON AND BRAZIL

NEO NAHDA by May Ziadé (12 mins) 
CASA IZABEL by Gil Baroni (85 mins) 
+Q&A (60 mins)

︎ Tickets

On the opening night of its 10th anniversary, Screening Rights is staging a special event at Warwick Arts Centre centred around queer archives and reenactments from Lebanon and Brazil and featuring May Ziadé’s short Neo Nahda alongside Gil Baroni’s feature Casa Izabel. Equal parts vivid reconstruction and ingenious fictionalisation of the narratives that have been suppressed or underrepresented due to the turbulent histories of the Middle East and Latin America, Ziadé’s and Baroni’s films, each in their unique way, outline queer genealogies and combat epistemic oblivion.

NEO NAHDA
May Ziadé / 2022 / UK / 12’ / English

In French-Lebanese filmmaker May Ziadé’s Neo Nahda, Mona, a young woman in modern-day London, goes down a rabbit hole of amateur research after coming across photographs of Arab women cross-dressing in 1920s Lebanon. Rich with photographic influences — Maryam Şahinyan, Van Leo, and Marie al-Khazen come to mind — Neo Nahda fuses together images discovered by Ziadé in the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut with inventions of her own. The result is an electrifying queer renaissance of sorts, hinted at in the film’s title (Nahda being the Islamic modernist movement — ‘the Awakening’ — of the early 20th century).

May Ziadé is a French and Lebanese filmmaker and filmworker based in London, whose work “explores the physical and emotional consequences of the cultural and social pressures to conform.”

CASA IZABEL
Gil Baroni / 2023 / Brazil / 85’ / Portuguese with English subtitles

Created in a similarly playful dialogue with the queer narratives of the past, Gil Baroni’s Casa Izabel was loosely inspired by the real-life story of Casa Susanna, a bungalow hidden in the woods of upstate New York where a group of transgender women and cross-dressing men would clandestinely convene and find refuge in the mid-20th century. While its function largely remains the same, in Baroni’s colourful, Almodóvarian comedic thriller, Casa is transported to the depths of the Brazilian forest of the 1960s. The story of the original Casa is given a deliciously dark twist, complicated by jealousy, racial and class tensions, and lurking political intrigue à la Kiss of the Spider Woman. It is a work of speculative fiction that is as indebted to Casa Susanna as it is to the tradition of Brazilian anti-fascist resistance.

Gil Baroni is a writer, director, and producer born in Brazil. His filmography approaches themes surrounding human rights issues, especially minority empowerment, gender equity, the LGBTQI+ universe, and social class struggle.

The screening will be accompanied by video introductions from the filmmakers and followed by a discussion featuring invited guests. The panellists will include guest curator Daniel Zacariotti (Film & TV PhD candidate at Warwick), actress and film curator Sarah Agha (of The Arab Film Club), the Queer Research Network (Airelle Amedro, Aman Sinha, and Polina Zelmanova, all PhD candidates at Warwick), and Misha Zakharov (curator at Screening Rights and Film & TV PhD candidate at Warwick).

UNCOVERING QUEER ARCHIVES IS A RADICAL ACT OF RESISTANCE: FILMS OF RESISTANCE RESPONDS TO MAY ZIADE’S NEO 

Archiving is an addictive form of resistance, especially when you uncover hidden treasures such as those that Mona finds during the course of May Ziadé’s Neo Nahda. Having come across a century-old photograph of cross-dressed Arab women, Mona finds herself feverishly following traces of queer Arab culture in London’s archives. Through an artistic counterpositioning of archival and filmed footage, Ziadé shows the self-exploratory effect of uncovering queer histories from the mainstream historical narrative — a reminder of the power of resistance in revealing alternative histories that global supremacy structures continuously attempt to suppress. Read the full response here︎

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Films of Resistance is a decentralised community film screening and fundraising resource that believes in the power of cinema to expose, inspire, reflect, frame and reframe; its ability to incite change and resistance on a local and global level. With documentary and fiction films chosen for their artistic impact, the initiative aims to inspire deep thinking, understanding, compassion, and — ultimately — long-term, sustainable and active resistance to the genocide and oppression of the Palestinian people.

QUEER REFUGIUM AND RESISTANCE AMIDST FASCIST STATES:
DANIEL ZACARIOTTI INTERVIEWS GIL BARONI ON CASA IZABEL

Set in Brazil in the early 1970s, during the military dictatorship, Casa Izabel depicts a group of men who gather annually, away from society, to cross-dress in a Casa Grande (the term used for the grand houses of slavers in colonial Brazil, as opposed to the Senzalas where the enslaved lived). By encapsulating the possibility of queer existence during a repressive government that enforced the erasure of deviant sexualities and genders, the film presents a contemporary intersectional reading of queerness, race, and class – balancing the film’s 1970s setting with the context of its production and distribution under Bolsonaro’s government. Read the full interview︎

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Daniel Zacariotti is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Warwick. His work is focused on queer art forms under far-right and fascist governments in Latin America, with a decolonial and intersectional epistemological approach.

Friday, October 18
︎ 18:00-20:40
︎ Coventry Transport Museum 

RAILROADS AND COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND IRAN

A STATE IN A STATE by Tekla Aslanishvili (46 mins) 
SCENES OF EXTRACTION by Sanaz Sohrabi (43 mins) 
+ Q&A (60 mins)
+ pre-screnening food reception (17:00-18:00)

︎ Tickets

Screening Rights Film Festival is bringing the latest socially engaged and formally innovative cinema from the Global South to audiences in the West Midlands. This year, we’re partnering with the Transport Museum in Coventry to stage a site-specific event that engages with the industrial heritage of the Midlands, as well as the British Petroleum archives at the University of Warwick. Titled RAILROADS AND COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND IRAN, it features Tekla Aslanishvili’s A State in a State alongside Sanaz Sohrabi’s Scenes of Extraction—two film essays that evoke detective investigations in the thoroughness of their research. In line with the 2024 festival’s theme, DOUBLE BILL, the screening tackles various geographical contexts that, on closer inspection, can be linked—in this case, British petrocolonialism in Iran and Soviet railroads in the South Caucasus.

A larger context for this screening is provided through an online programme, hosted by Screening Rights in collaboration with the Birmingham-based arts initiative Grand Union, titled ONE’S CONNECTION IS ANOTHER’S DIVISION: COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND PALESTINE, featuring Sebastia Disagreement by Yiru Qian and A Passage by Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari.

A STATE IN A STATE

Tekla Aslanishvili / 2022 / Georgia / 47’ / Georgian, Russian, and English with English subtitles

In her symphonic, richly multilingual documentary, Georgian filmmaker Tekla Aslanishvili collects oral testimonies from railway workers, journalists, and researchers who worked on or around the railways that connect(ed) Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Over time, these railway workers developed chains of solidarity that transcended the politics of the nation-states to which they belonged. Although many of the railways are classified and therefore prohibited from filming, they emerge as somewhat of a protagonist in the film—the titular semi-autonomous “state within a state,” historically an instrument of colonisation, now being used to turn the tables on the oppressors.

Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, filmmaker and essayist whose works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics.

SCENES OF EXTRACTION
Sanaz Sohrabi / 2023 / Canada/Iran / 43’ / English and Farsi with English subtitles 

In the second part of her ongoing trilogy on British petrocolonialism in Iran—following the acclaimed One Image, Two Acts (2020)—Iranian filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi delves deeper into the declassified photographic archives of British Petroleum to uncover haunting stories of labour exploitation, ecological devastation, and extractivism, focussing specifically on the role railroads played within the larger colonial infrastructures. The screening of this work is intended to engage with the industrial heritage of the Midlands, as well as the British Petroleum archives housed at the University of Warwick.

Sanaz Sohrabi is an artist, filmmaker and essayist whose work investigates the impermanence and malleability of historical records and narratives.

The screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion, featuring guest curator Milija Gluhovic, researcher Evelina Gambino, and filmmaker Yiru Qian (more guests TBA). The screening will be preceded by a food reception (17:00-18:00) by the freegan initiative The Real Junk Food Project Central. 

An interview between academics Milija Gluhovic and Evelina Gambino on A State in a State forthcoming. 

Evelina Gambino is the Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research is concerned with a situated analysis of global logistics. She has done ethnographic work around several flagship connectivity infrastructures in Georgia and the South Caucasus. In collaboration with artist and director Tekla Aslanishvili she has produced the experimental documentary A State in A State.

Milija Gluhovic is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. His research interests include contemporary European theatre and performance, memory studies and psychoanalysis, discourses of European identity, migration and human rights, as well as religion, secularity, and politics.

ON OIL WORKERS’ LABOUR MILITANCY:
AN EXCERPT FROM KATAYOUN SHAFIEE’S MACHINERIES OF OIL

Oil’s unique physical and chemical properties demand that each category of work—drilling, pipeline construction, well maintenance, transportation, and refining—utilizes specific kinds of skilled and unskilled laborers such as drillers, pipeline fitters, engineers, geologists, and chemists. The layout and design of oil infrastructure, namely, that it has an enclave character and requires oil wells, a pipeline, and a refinery to transform the oil into marketable products, result in distinct methods of monitoring and surveillance of workers. The oil workers’ capacity to form unions and “engage in strike activity” is drastically reduced, especially when considering that other sources of oil can be relied on and tankers can be rerouted to replace a sudden loss of oil elsewhere. Thus, one reason oil companies have succeeded in making enormous profits has been “their ability to contain labor militancy.” Where labor militancy has occurred, it has generally been concentrated in refinery operations where there are large concentrations of skilled workers who occupy strategic positions to disrupt the economies of both oil-exporting and oil-consuming countries. Over time, pumping stations and pipelines replaced railways as the main means of transporting a liquid form of energy, rather than a solid, from the site of production to refineries and tankers for shipping abroad. This meant the infrastructure of oil operations was vulnerable but not as easy to incapacitate through strike actions as were railways that carried coal, for example. Read the full excerpt here︎

Katayoun Shafiee is an Associate Professor in the History of the Middle East at the University of Warwick. She specialises in the history and material politics of large-scale infrastructures in the modern Middle East. Her first book, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (MIT Press, 2018), integrates Middle Eastern history with interdisciplinary approaches in science and technology studies, reconfiguring the politics of the region through an examination of the British-controlled oil industry in Iran.

Saturday, October 19
︎ 14:00-17:00
︎ Cinema at MAC Birmingham

PALESTINIAN-UKRAINIAN SOLIDARITY SCREENING 1: COLLECTING STORIES, PRESERVING CULTURE

DANCING PALESTINE by Lamees Almakkawy (37 mins)
WEIGHTLESS by Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas (70 mins)
+ Q&A (60 mins)
+ after-screening reception (17:00-18:00)

︎ Tickets

Screening Rights Film Festival is bringing the latest socially engaged and formally innovative cinema from the Global South to audiences in the West Midlands. The centrepiece of its 10th-anniversary edition, subtitled DOUBLE BILL, consists of two Palestinian-Ukrainian solidarity screenings designed to complement one another. The first of these, featuring Lamees Almakkawy’s Dancing Palestine and Marta Hryniuk’s and Nick Thomas’s Weightless, is dedicated to resisting the perpetual, ages-long genocides through cultural preservation.

Book your tickets for the second screening, featuring Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso, XXXI, 108 and Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, here. 

DANCING PALESTINE
Lamees Almakkawy / 2024 / UK / 37’ / Arabic, English with English subtitles

“When home is gone, the body becomes home.” At the heart of Lamees Almakkawy’s mid-length film essay Dancing Palestine is dabke, historically a workers' dance that has, over time, evolved into a form of remembrance and resistance. Through an ingenious and deeply moving interplay between the material and immaterial, the past and the present, the film combines digital screen-life elements, analogue archives, and dabke performances set against photos of Palestinian landscapes projected onto the dancers’ bodies. Drawing on the same theme of Palestinian cultural preservation that was prominent in last year’s Screening Rights title, Jumana Manna’s Foragers, Almakkawy’s film posits dabke as a defiant, life-affirming celebration of Palestinian culture in the face of its perpetual extermination. Completed as part of her Creative Documentary by Practice MFA at the Anthropology Department of University College London, and realised in close collaboration with Palestinian dabke dancers, Almakkawy’s film premiered at the latest Sheffield Doc, the premier documentary film festival in the UK, where it received a Special Mention prize.

Lamees Almakkawy obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Film and New Media from New York University Abu Dhabi, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Documentary by Practice from University College London. Her interests lie in the intersection of documentary and fiction filmmaking, focusing on identity, performance, and memory.

WEIGHLTESS
Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas / 2023 / Netherlands, Ukraine / 70’ / English, Ukrainian with English subtitles

Khrystyna Bunii is an anthropologist who collects the culture of the Hutsuls, a unique ethnographic group of people living in the west of Ukraine. Marta Hryniuk’s and Nick Thomas’s Weightless follows Bunii as she digitises family photos, collects clothes and food recipes, and records tsymbaly music and oral histories of displacement and genocide. What emerges is a fragile yet ever-persistent culture situated at a politically tumultuous crossroads of cultures, languages, and ideologies, one that has been — and continues to be — resisting erasure. While Alisa Kovalenko’s We Will Not Fade Away, screened as part of last year’s Screening Rights, was filmed in the bleak east of Ukraine, where russia’s war has been raging for a decade, Weightless takes place in the breathtaking Carpathian Mountains before the start of the russian full-scale invasion, presenting a different perspective by highlighting the unruly beauty of the natural landscape and Hutsul culture.

Marta Hryniuk and Nick Thomas are visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural organisers based in Rotterdam, where they established the film collective WET film.

The screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion, moderated by Falasteen on Film and featuring guest curator Stefan Lacny (UCL), filmmakers Lamees Almakkawy, Marta Hryniuk and Nick Thomas, and humanitarian expert and healthcare worker Yafa Ajweh. The screening will be followed by a reception (17:00-18:00), featuring traditional food from the the Ukrainian Sunflower and Bayt Al-Yemeni.

LEGACY IN MOTION:
ALA AL-ZENATI RESPONDS TO LAMEES ALMAKKAWY’S DANCING PALESTINE

The selection of archival images was a meticulous process. Almakkawy sought images that would best support the narrative she wanted to convey—one that depicted Palestinians as more than victims of occupation. She wanted to avoid reinforcing the common narrative of Palestinians as solely defined by their struggles. Instead, she aimed to empower them by showing their vibrant cultural life, their resilience, and their deep love for life. The archival images chosen for the film reflect this approach, depicting Palestinians celebrating, working, and living life to the fullest, often in the face of adversity. Read the full response︎

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Ala Al-Zenati is a Palestinian activist and founder of a community called Jadeela Heritage, which is dedicated to preserving and celebrating Palestinian culture. She focuses on teaching younger generations about the stories and songs passed down from her grandparents, fostering a deeper connection to their heritage.

STEFAN LACNY RESPONDS TO MARTA HRYNIUK’S AND NICK THOMAS’S WEIGHTLESS

Through images of long-concealed photographs and recorded folk displays, the documentary showcases the originality of the Hutsuls’ traditional clothing, songs and musical instruments, all shot against a scenic Carpathian background. Yet Hutsul life is far from idyllic. Bunii uncovers the region’s present-day economic difficulties and the persecution of its people under Soviet rule. As Bunii attempts to present the highlanders’ past through their own pictures and words, she is hindered by the Hutsuls’ reluctance to discuss their historical experiences. In this reflection on repression and memory, perhaps the most striking takeaway is the gap of communication and understanding that persists between Ukrainians from the lowlands and the Hutsuls, who remain stubbornly resistant to efforts by outsiders to tell their story. Read the full response︎

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO 

Stefan Lacny is a Lecturer in Russian Culture, Language and Translation at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. He has recently completed a PhD in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research examined Soviet cinematic depictions of Poles and Ukrainians from 1925 to 1941, in the context of the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. His interests include Soviet nationalities policies, Stalin-era formulations of Soviet Ukrainian identity and the significance of borders in the Soviet cultural imagination. His article "(Re)discovering Ukrainianness: Hutsul Folk Culture and Ukrainian Identity in Soviet Film, 1939-1941" was published this year in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.