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)

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, 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.