A FEELING GREATER THAN LOVE
(Shu’our akbar min el hob)
Mary Jirmanus Saba
2017 | 99″ | Arabic, subtitled

An old man with a loudspeaker drives through southern Lebanon calling for people to join a demonstration and support workers who’ve occupied a tobacco company and are now being besieged by the army. His words reenact moments of forgotten protests in 1973, made by the tobacco farmers against the landholders’ monopoly and the strike for better working conditions at a Beirut chocolate factory. Looking for both a lost era and strategies able to be applied to current struggles, the filmmaker search for clues through interviews and archival documents, asking questions about the possibilities for militant action in film and society.

May 4th ● 9.30pm

SAFEHOUSE
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
2018 | 20″ | Spanish, Engsub

Three actors perform gestures that we could imagine might take place in a clandestine apartment, but they also listen to music, eat, and take pleasure in being by themselves and developing a way of being together. The performers are both themselves and imagined others—members of FALN movement which was based in part in Chicago. The work examines the complicated desires, anxieties, and split subjects that emerge from the toll of colonialism and forms of resistance to it. Informed as much by what is said and can be seen as by what is invisible, gone, and remains unsaid, the film reformulates the constellation of ideas surrounding history of the movement.

ONEIROMANCER
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
2017 | 26″ | English and Spanish, Engsub

Oneiromancer is the first of a series of works by Santiago Mun oz, on the sensorial unconscious of the Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement. It centers on the figures, places, and leftover materials of the members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacio n Nacional, a clandestine group, who were arrested and sentenced to near-lifetime prison terms for their political activities.

VIVIR EN JUNIO CON LA LENGUA AFUERA
(To live in June with Your Tongue Hanging Out)
Coco Fusco
2018 | 27″ | Spanish, Engsub

The video explores Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’ vision and experience of the island, as a former supporter of cuban revolution who later on became a political dissident. Fusco follows Arenas’ footsteps in Havana’s Lenin Park, where in 1970s he would organize secret literary gatherings there, and later on in 1974, he became fugitive there for months and drafted his memoir, “Before Night Falls”. Three Cuban artists in the film attempt to read by heart, one of Arenas’s most famous poems about yearning for a homeland that has been ripped away from those who fought to free it.