88 Lothian Road
Sun 30 Aug · 20:15
Screening as part of Falastin Film Festival 2026 . This screening will have a ten-minute intermission. Together, these four films imagine Palestine otherwise—through science fiction, speculative storytelling, and acts of intimate imagination—to ask what becomes possible when liberation is first rehearsed in the mind. Across visions of return, inherited memory, and futures both distant and immediate, the programme proposes imagination not as an escape from political reality, but as a necessary practice for creating it. FILMS FEATURED: In Vitro (dir. Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, UK/Palestine, 2019, 28 mins, Arabic w/ English subtitles) In Vitro is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi short filmed in black and white. It is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Alia, played by Hiam Abbass, is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia, played by Maisa Abd Elhadi, comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild. The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia. Central to their discussion is the intricate relationship between past, present and future, with the Bethlehem setting providing a narratively, politically and symbolically charged backdrop. Upshot (dir. Maha Haj, Palestine/Italy/France, 2024, 34 mins, Arabic w/ English subtitles) After suffering unimaginable loss, Suleiman and Lubna retreat to an isolated farm, where they tend to their crops and engage in impassioned debates about their five children's choices - until one day a stranger arrives to reveal a harrowing truth. Pales
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.