Program Details
February 15, 2024–February 29, 2024, available worldwide, free of charge.
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Alaa Abu Asad, Basma al-Sharif, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Muhammad El Khairy, Rehab Nazzal
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Images Festival, Toronto
Parables for the Future Sun, is an online program that features Palestinian artists and filmmakers who have worked with Images Festival during the past ten years. With contributions by Alaa Abu Asad, Basma al-Sharif, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy and Rehab Nazzal, the program oscillates between reality and possibility, soaring across generations, throughout the diaspora and back home again. With these videos, Parables for the Future Sun offers wishes, tales, and testimony up to the sun for safekeeping.
Program Schedule
P is for Palestine, Muhammad El Khairy, 2018 | Jordan, Palestine | Digital | 6 min | Arabic and English with English subtitles.
Language is political in this subtle short film that shows an unnamed man in Amman, Jordan repeating decontextualized political English words all including the letter P – a letter that doesn’t exist in the Arabic language, meaning that one’s pronunciation of it is coded socially and economically.
Vibrations from Gaza, Rehab Nazzal, 2023 | Palestine | Digital | 16 min | Arabic and Palestinian Sign Language (PSL) with English subtitles.
In Vibrations from Gaza, Deaf children who call Gaza home share their experiences of Israel’s frequent military attacks.
At the verge of worldlessness, Alaa Abu Asad, 2023 | Palestine, Netherlands | Digital | 4 min | Arabic with English subtitles.
Relying on sound editing and its effects, this stop motion video delves deeper into understanding the photograph: exceeding its specific time and place and exposing what lies beyond what is seen in each image. The work looks into and through each photograph in search of any gap—an opening or crack, visible or invisible—imagining what might be “hiding” in them. What can these photographs teach us about their time and place? Their past and present-day lives? And possible foreseeing of the future?
Feast of Inhabitants, Larissa Sansour, 2012 |Palestine | Digital | 15 min | Arabic with English subtitles.
A group of friends meet in Bethlehem, Palestine for a lavish feast.
Balconies, Kamal Aljafari, 2002 | Palestine, Switzerland, Germany | Digital | 26 min | French, English, Arabic.
An experimental meditation focusing on the deteriorating and unfinished balconies of Kamal Aljafari’s hometown, Ramleh, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo.” But now I am not I, nor is my house now my house…
Deep Sleep, Basma al-Sharif, 2014 | Malta, Greece, Gaza | Super 8 > HD Digital | 12 mins | No Dialogue.
Temporarily restricted from travel to the Gaza Strip, I undertook the study and practice of autohypnosis with the purpose of bi-locating into multiple places at once. Paired with field recordings rendered into a binaural beat soundtrack, Deep Sleep is made up of a year-long work of bi-location sessions recorded onto Super 8mm film. The result is a movement through the ruins of ancient civilizations as embedded in modern civilization-in-ruins. Deep Sleep draws from the historical avant-garde cinema to produce an invitation to move through a body as a body, to transcend geographical borders in a collective act that discards memory in exchange for a visceral present.
Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. Language and plants are central themes through which he develops alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding can intersect. His work takes the form of writing, film, and interactive installations, in which he visually represents his research and explores the boundaries of languages.
Born stateless, 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 work.
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. He attended the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin, Germany. His most recent work, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, premiered at Corti d’Autore in the Locarno Film Festival 2022. He just completed A Fidai Film and is preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.
Larissa Sansour was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, Palestine. She uses science fiction to address social and political issues. She represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. In 2020, Larissa was the shared recipient of the prestigious Jarman Award. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos, and sculptures.
Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Toronto, Canada. Her work deals with the effects of settler colonial violence on peoples, on land, and on other non-human life in colonized territories.
Jaclyn Quaresma 