For the full Cultural Centre programme of events (January - March 2020) please click here
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5 February 2020
Film Screening: Bellissima (1951)
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 6:00 p.m.
113 mins. | Drama/Comedy | Italy | Arabic subtitles
Director: Luchino Visconti
Maddalena Cecconi is a working-class woman who works on securing her daughter’s future career in the cinema. For her daughter to pass the screen test, Maddalena is ready to make any sacrifice, which makes her an easy prey for one of the studio employees who prepares her daughter for the test and offers dancing and acting lessons and gives her a makeover in exchange for money. This strips the mother of her savings and jeopardises her marriage. The child, however, suffers a seizure, and the mother realises that she is ignorant of her daughter’s needs in exchange for her own desires and dreams.
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6 February 2020
Film Screening: Wild Relatives (2018)
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 6:00 p.m.
66 mins. | Lebanon, Norway and Germany | Arabic, Norwegian and English with English subtitles
Writer, Director and Co-Producer: Jumana Manna
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012, an international agricultural research centre was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution-turned-war and began the laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard backups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.
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8 February 2020
Tour with the curator Yazid Anani “Forensic Architecture: Assembled Practices,” exhibition
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 4:00 p.m.
About the exhibition
Assembled Practices exhibits investigations conducted by the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture in collaboration with communities affected by and resisting state and corporate violence, environmental destruction and human-rights violations.
Together, the three investigations hosted by the A.M. Qattan Foundation—The Killing of Harith Augustus, Torture in Saydnaya Prison and Triple-Chaser—reveal the multiplicity of ways Forensic Architecture’s practice transforms and expands to speak directly to the political contexts within which it operates.
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12 February 2020
Film Screening: Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari (1919)
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 6:00 p.m.
72 mins. | Horror/thriller | Germany | Silent with musical score
Director: Robert Weine
In the little village of Holstenwall on the Dutch border, fairground hypnotist Dr. Caligari puts on show with a somnambulist called Cesaré who has been asleep for 23 years. At night, dressed in a black body stocking and with a ghostly white face, he slithers through the town murdering people on the doctor’s orders. A student has his suspicions about Caligari after a friend is found dead and it transpires that the doctor is the director of a lunatic asylum.
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15 February 2020
Artist Talk: Jumana Manna
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 6:00 p.m.
Jumana Manna is a Palestinian artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of state building and histories of place. Manna received a BFA from the National Academy of Arts in Oslo and an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute of the Arts. She has participated in multiple festivals and exhibitions, including the Viennale International Film Festival, BAFICI, IFFR Rotterdam, Tate Modern, the Marrakech Biennale 6, The Nordic Pavilion and the 57th Venice Biennale.
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19 February 2020
Film Screening: A Man Escaped (1956)
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 6:00 p.m.
101 mins. | Drama | France | Black and white | Arabic subtitles
Director: Robert Bresson
Under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1945, the Germans arrested Lieutenant Fontaine of the Secret Resistance Army and sentenced him to death.
In his cell, the lieutenant awaits execution with the sole hope of escaping. Preparations begin with an atmosphere of anxiety—sharpening a spoon, digging into the ground, making ropes. This masterpiece by director Robert Bryson revealed new ways of portraying the inner world of his characters, especially through his use of audio.
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22 February 2020
Lecture: Max Haiven
Time and Location: at A.M. Qattan Foundation in Al-Tira, Ramallah, at 6:00 p.m.
Language: English wit translation to Arabic
Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Anishinaabe territories on the north shore of Lake Superior (Thunder Bay, Canada). His work focuses on the power of the imagination. He is the author of Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (Pluto Press, 2018) and of Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (to come May 2020).
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26 February 2020
Film Screening: Mother (1926)
87 mins. | Drama | Soviet Union | Silent with Arabic subtitles
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
This film takes place during the first Russian Revolution, which began in 1905 and was defeated by the Tsarist Army. The film is based on the brilliant Russian Novelist Maxim Gorky and tells the story of a working woman whose life transforms from political naivety to revolutionary consciousness through her painful experience, witnessing the killing of her Tsarist police agent husband by revolutionary elements joined by her son. The film is considered one of the most important works of early Soviet cinema in terms of poetic and innovative editing styles. “The foundation of film art is editing…The expression that the film is “shot” is entirely false and should disappear from the language. The film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material,” Pudovkin wrote in his first book, Film Technique.
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Ongoing events:
- Suzan Hijab: Retrospective Exhibition
- Forensic Architecture: Assembled Practices Exhibition
