ECHOES OF A DISTANT HOME
Five Stories of Longing and Identity
In this screening programme, we bring together filmmakers who explore the feeling of identity in the transience created by migration and exile that leaves us balancing the home we lost and the home we created.
Screening followed by a panel discussion
Films in this programme:
Bye Bye Tiberias
Dir. Lina Soualem, 82 mins
Leaving her village to follow her dream of becoming an actress, Hiam Abbass also left behind her mother, grandmother and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter Lina returns with her to journey through the vanished places among the scattered memories of four generations of daring Palestinian women.
In Three Layers of Darkness
Dir. Houcem Slouli, 15 mins
The film follows Ghassen, a young Tunisian man, in his quest to obtain a visa, addressing the themes of immigration and perseverance against bureaucratic injustice for a fundamental right: freely moving in this world.
Bladi | My Country
Dir. Leila Gamaz, 5 mins
Drawing on family lived experience of destitution and sleeping on the underground in 80s Paris, Bladi - My Country uses the train as a vehicle to explore how displacement feels as an embodied experience across generations. Personal and public archives are pieced together, blurring linear timeframes that speak to the haziness of memory and ongoing colonial subjugation of people we see around the world today.
Liminal
Dir. Reem Maghrib, 4 mins
Inspired by an oral history collection that includes interviews with Syrians living in different cities in western asia and western europe, Liminal is a short animated film that reflects on the impact of conflict and migration on Syrian identity. It forms part of an ongoing study into the liminal space in which new identities are forming, at a time when Syrians are treading the threshold between a silent tyrannic past and an unknown future.
Lost in Time
Dir. Maryam Hassanein, 21 mins
A docu-fiction follows 2 young Egyptian women’s journeys exploring past memories from the 60s-80s through archival home videos, audio recordings, and recreation of movie scenes.
