The first week of December starts with a difficult decision. Monday offers two poignant screenings. In collaboration with Courtisane and Eye on Palestine, KASKcinema begins the week with a screening of A Fidai Film (2024) by Kamal Aljafari. The film presents rare moving images of Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, taken as spoils of war during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. Aljafari poetically interweaves history with art, grief with longing, and resistance with sabotage. Every image and montage bear the traces of this rich, layered mix of personal and collective memories. The screening is preceded by a lecture-performance by Mohanad Yaqubi, a Palestinian filmmaker and co-founder of Idioms Film, exploring archiving as a counter to oblivion and translating kinships into inventories, transcripts, and captions.
Also on Monday, Art Cinema OFFoff is showing Extreme Private Eros: Love Song (1974) by Kazuo Hara, a film of incredible intimacy. When his ex-wife called Kazuo Hara to film the birth of their child, the filmmaker travelled to Okinawa and filmed her for two years with a 16mm handheld camera. “The only way to keep the relationship was to make a film,” Hara reflects in a voiceover at the film’s opening. Still in love, obsessive, and jealous, he portrayed his ex, Miyuki Takeda, while she was in a relationship first with a woman and then with an African-American G.I., with whom she would have a child. Over time, Miyuki asserts herself more and more vis-à-vis Hara, using the film as a stage and a record of her sexual rebellion. Extreme Private Eros will be presented by Clara Spilliaert in the context of her solo exhibition My Sister is Pregnant, currently showing at Kunsthal Gent until December 29.
Our third film of the week, Sambizanga by Sarah Maldoror, was selected by Alice Diop for Sabzian’s annual State of Cinema event in 2023. The film portrays Angola’s struggle for independence through the eyes of a woman whose husband is imprisoned and tortured to death by the Portuguese due to his involvement in the burgeoning independence movement. Like the two preceding films, Sambizanga presents a powerful critique of dominant perspectives – in this case, a white, masculine and colonialist viewpoint.
