88 Lothian Road
Fri 28 Aug · 17:30
Screening as part of Falastin Film Festival 2026 . This screening will be followed by a zoom Q&A with Diala Ayesh. How do we tell the stories of our prisoners? Across essay film, fiction, and documentary, this programme explores storytelling as a form of resistance against the silencing and isolation imposed by incarceration. Drawing from Walid Daqqa’s notion of parallel time—the suspended temporality imposed by colonial imprisonment, where prisoners are severed from the linear time of the outside world—the films reveal prison not only as a site of confinement, but as a space where culture, thought, and connection continue to exist. In the context of ongoing struggles around political imprisonment, including the Filton 25 case here in the UK, the programme also asks how narratives of prisoners are constructed, challenged, and reclaimed. FILMS FEATURED: When Solid Turns To Dust, Or A Note On Liquidity From Palestine (dir. Samira Makki, Lebanon, 2026, 13 mins, English) This video essay explores liquidity, and its intermittent leaks, as a poetic and political proposition informing anti-colonial struggles. The essay takes its cue from a letter that political prisoner and martyr Walid Daqqa wrote in 2005 where he theorized Parallel Time under Zionist captivity at a high-security facility known as the Gilboa prison. More than a decade later, the same prison became a marker of the historical escape orchestrated by six Palestinian prisoners. Importantly, the escape became an attestation of the possibility of transgression: the Zionist project, in its high-security doctrine and carceral apparatus, are but an illusion made up of dust, as Mahmoud Al-Arda reiterated. The escape triggered the anxiety of the settler-colony not only as it denoted a leak from the ostensibly impenetrable Parallel Time. Rather, the leak expresses an outright commitment to futurity where there is seemingly none. Bonboné (dir. Rakan Mayasi, Palestine/Lebanon, 2017, 15 mins, Arabic w/ English subtitles)
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.