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GRAMNet Film Series – February 2016
Wednesday 10th February 2016 @ 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm
In observance of World Day of Social Justice
Queens of Syria
Lebanon, Jordan, UK, UAE (2014) | Director: Yasmin Fedda | 60 mins | In Arabic with English Subtitles
‘Queens of Syria’ tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of the Trojan Women, the timeless Ancient Greek tragedy about the plight of women in war.
What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like themselves, uprooted, enslaved, and bereaved by the Trojan War.
Winner of the Black Pearl Award for Best Director from the Arab World at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, 2014
Cartographers
Scotland, Italy (2015) | Director: Valentina Bonizzi | 20 mins
Blending the register of the ethnographic interview with the mechanical vision of the aerial view, the film describes the migrant experience between alienation and the imaginative genius of the quotidian resistance.
Produced between 2012 and 2015 in Molise, Scotland and Paris, ‘Cartographers’ registers the unprecedented role of cartography employed by a generation of Italians who experienced migration, whether physically or imaginatively, and the direct influence of World War II. Cartographic production is generally associated with power dynamics dictated from above. Cartographers, instead is loaded with a different cartographic experience: the mapping of space and time operated from underneath, traced through the intimate and uncertain relief of memories, calibrated on variable shades of sensible experiences.
The bureaucratic language of Nation State, and the impersonal logic of political decisions that fix arbitrary borders becomes ridiculed and emptied through the stories of the Cartographers, that even though they have to comply with imposed constrains, they manage to carve out gateways of resistance.