RESISTERE
The Other Space
Los Angeles
July 17, 2024
New ways — that is, cinematic ways — to look at Palestine could be more accessible in a city experiencing a repertory resurgence. The largest programmers have deferred the subject to the microcinemas and margins. I am underemployed and manically bookmark Instagram flyers, so I’ve seen my fair share and improved my vision in turn. But it’s easy these days to feel disappointed in how images circulate and to what ends. Enter Resistere, a new Palestinian film series launched last month at the Other Space, a black box theater down the block from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s old studio in West Hollywood, presented by Film Workers for Palestine and SAG-AFTRA and Sister Guild Members for Palestine, among others. My eyes took some time to adjust to the dark, packed room as I entered. Tickets sold out in three days, said filmmakers Nadine Mundo and Rena Mundo Croshere, who introduced the show. They said they hope the series can combat censorship, strengthen solidarity, and “change the way we see the world and forge deep human connections.”
The program’s opening short narrated a feeling of impotence, complicating the night’s premise. Basma al-Sharif’s The Story of Milk and Honey (2011) is an essay film about an unnamed person’s failure to create a different kind of film. Their stated goal was “the collective telling of a fictional love story set in a Middle East devoid of political context.” Yellow text playfully arranged on-screen in English and voiced in Arabic by writer and translator Mahmoud Chrieh details the person’s work process in wandering Markerian style. They studied maps, love songs, and family photographs; partially plagiarized a script from the Song of Songs; shot 35 mm stills in Jordan and later, secretly, in Beirut, of people on the Corniche on Sundays; lost track of their research; scribbled on plants in books; produced “a video that had no images,” “a love story that wasn’t genuine,” “unclear questions about nationalism.” What seems to be some of that visual material occasionally appears behind the text and was installed alongside the film in gallery exhibitions like phantom footnotes. The author finds themself with “nothing left to write, “no research to uncover,” “no photographs to take,” “no songs to discover,” but their effort is its own love story. The essay negotiates a settlement with its sense of defeat that reminds us art is a pretense.
Ahmad Saleh’s stop-motion short Night (2021) and Lina Soualem’s documentary feature Bye Bye Tiberias (2023) followed. Both works star Soualem’s mother, actress Hiam Abbass: in the former, she voices a woman searching ruins for her child; in the latter (which for its part played this year at Laemmle Monica and Vidiots’ side room), she guides her actual daughter through family history. Soualem is interested in reinscribing stories of displacement and estrangement and asks her mom, at times seeming amused and at others begrudging, to pin photos on walls, read old letters, act out memories. They tour sites in Galilee where Abbass’s grandmother fled during the Nakba and where Abbass grew up before leaving for France to pursue acting. Her alienation as a kid under Israeli occupation becomes evident as the film commemorates the old family home.
Afterward, the room discussed experiences of exile and industry organizing, but not so much movies. Someone from the Arab Film & Media Institute mentioned the Academy before stopping themself: “I will need some alcohol to talk about them.”
