Film screening + Q&A
Exile and a digital elsewhere
- Date
- Monday 31 March 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.47
What if you cannot travel to your place of origin? Because you are an undocumented Syrian migrant in Lebanon (Offside), or because your family was displaced from Palestine in 1948 (31°42'49.5"N 35°10'13.9"E). The people central to the two short films showed at this event, both creatively use digital tools to shape a virtual reality from their positions of exile.
Offside, Marwan Hamdan (Beirut, 2015, 20 min.)
'My friend Samir was born and raised in Beirut, where he lived illegally. During his search for identity and a sense of belonging, Samir was briefly a member of the Lebanese Communist Party, and that is where I met him. Today, ten years have passed since we left the ranks of the party, leaving our failure behind us. Samir recounts where the quest for his identity led him and how he ended up trading a hopeless cause for a successful one. After the defeat of the leftist project, and feeling unable to relate to the real world, Samir created his own alternative universe where victories were not impossible. In the past, our regular party meetings took place at Samir’s house. We continue to meet there on a regular basis. However, the cause that once bound us has changed…'
31°42'49.5"N 35°10'13.9"E (Rotterdam, 2023, 10 min.)
In this video essay, Francisca Khamis Giacoman revisits the remnants of her family home in Al-Makhrour in Palestine that is inaccessible to her family.
Khamis Giacoman interweaves fact, fiction, histories and memories to reconstruct the house that lives on as a ghost in her family’s oral tradition. How are spaces that we cannot reach represented? And is there something in not knowing that opens a space to new possibilities?
About Marwan Hamdan
Marwan Hamdan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where he lives and works as a filmmaker. His practice revolves around exploring documents, mainly images and recordings, and stories of Beirut’s political and social modern history. He has shown his work at various places including Ashkal Alwan Beirut, De Ateliers Amsterdam, the Berlinale, and Trafo Szczecin. A solo exhibition will open on April 11 in art space Marwan, Amsterdam.
About Francisca Khamis Giacoman
Francisca Khamis Giacoman (Chile, 1988) is an artist based in Amsterdam. Coming from the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, her recent works deal with fragmented diasporic memories. In performances and installations, she recollects stories of migration and unfolds them at the boundaries of fiction and materiality. Her video and sound works use family archives to focus on the solidification of in-between identities. Khamis Giacoman has exhibited her works at various places including Biblioteka in London, ExtraCiy in Antwerp, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Stroom in Den Haag and Gold+Beton, Cologne.
