InFrame/Special Event

At ΕΜΣΤ

Archives of Belonging

ارشيف الوجد

What remains of a place when its people are displaced? How do images, memories and stories preserve a sense of belonging across borders and generations?

Archives of Belonging brings together two films that explore the persistent relationship between people, place and memory. Moving between archival images, personal histories and landscapes shaped by displacement, the films invite us to consider how histories are recorded and whose voices, lives and experiences become part of the archive.

Diana Allan’s Partition revisits images of Palestine under British rule, bringing colonial-era footage into dialogue with the voices and memories of Palestinian refugees. Razan AlSalah’s A Stone’s Throw follows a journey through displacement, connecting Palestine’s history with labour, migration and the infrastructures of oil across the region.
Together, the films open a space for reflection on the ways cinema can recover, reframe and carry histories that continue to shape the present.

Partition

تقسيم

Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio of Palestinian refugees recorded in Lebanon, tracing lines of continuity left by seismic displacement. Silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told, and ways of colonial seeing that seep into the present. In this lyrical documentary, Diana Allen uses dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to examine both. Recovering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, unraveling colonial pasts through soundscapes of the precarious present, Partition is a meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget.

A Stone's Throw

على مرمى حجر

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and a work camp in the Arab Gulf. A Stone’s Throw trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Razan Al Salah’s film revisits an emblematic moment of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blew up a BP pipeline.