Origin: Palestine | Fiction | Director: Reem Shilleh | 14 minutes

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Perpetual Recurrences

Curated by: Reem Shilleh

Reem Shilleh presents a montage of four decades of filmmaking in and about
Palestine in which repetition is central.

This film programme-which is, rather, a montage-exhibits a collection of
scenes that gather around each other to form sequences. They do this
dictated by repetitive occurrences, be that location, political discourse,
mise-en-scène, objects, and so on. From the flashing image or sound, to the
classroom, the militant in an open field delivering a speech with a tree
somewhere in sight, young women seated on a floor discussing revolutionary
politics, and to travelling shots in the tight alleyways of refugee camps
and from inside cars moving through streets and checkpoints, they are
plucked out from their heavily politicized filmic contexts, form and
content-wise.

Then, they are placed in sequences and screened to observe the political
panoply of the moving image produced in and about Palestine. The fragments
were extracted from a number of films and videos created over the last four
decades about Palestine, tracking repetition in works from militant
filmmaking during the Palestinian revolutionary period 1968-82, post-Oslo,
and more contemporary films and videos. Some of the authors, to name a few,
include Nils Vest, Basma Alsharif, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, Mahdi
Fleifel, and Michel Khleifi.

Director's interview: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170624-there-is-a-mythology-about-what-return-is/