88 Lothian Road
Sun 30 Aug · 12:45
Screening as part of Falastin Film Festival 2026 . This screening will be followed by a Q&A with the directors. When return is interrupted, memory finds other routes. Bringing together three experimental films, this programme traces how voices, maps, and imagined conversations become ways of navigating inaccessible homelands, preserving collective memory, and sustaining relationships to places that can no longer be reached, but are never left behind FILMS FEATURED: untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends.. (dir. Jayce Salloum, Lebanon/Canada, 2002, 13 mins, Arabic w/ English subtitles) A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and flowers growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 1982 slaughter at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Cloud footage, Hubble space imagery, the visible body crosscuts, and abstract shots of slow motion water, add to this reflection of the past, its present context and foreshadowing trajectory. With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, and the collection of audio accompanying the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape provides an elegiac response to the ongoing Palestinian dispossession & genocide. Memory Is a Stranger (Flowers of Sudden Return) (dir. Hajar Ibrahim, Scotland, 2025, 7 mins, English and Arabic w/ English subtitles) Memory is a Stranger (Flowers of a Sudden Return) is a short archival-experimental documentary assembled from family footage filmed by the filmmaker's late grandfather in Gaza's Nuseirat Refugee Camp, alongside an auditory landscape gathered over several years and made up entirely from her own recordings archiving the families oral testimonies and gatherings, protests, family folkloric songs, and field recordings. Unable to
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.