How do images shape our relationships to time and place? How can our experience of engaging with images be read through local contexts that emerge from our own cultural frameworks? Drawing on a recently completed 12-month research fellowship conducted across multiple contexts, Selma Shaban reflects on how film archiving is practiced in different countries across the Global South. Through these varied experiences, she examines how preservation practices and film cultures navigate systems of erasure.

Engaging with ongoing efforts and experiments in audiovisual preservation, the talk proposes emerging frameworks for creating, interpreting, and archiving images. Situated within the context of the mediated genocide of Palestinians, it considers the liberatory potential of expanding archival possibilities and practices.

The talk will be conducted in English. To register, please fill in the form here.

Selma Shaban is a film curator and researcher whose work focuses on anti-colonial film movements and on experimental approaches to creating liberatory moving-image practices. Most recently, she completed a Watson Fellowship where she researched and trained in film archiving practices across multiple countries in the Global South. Her work includes curating film programs and delivering talks in cities such as Philadelphia, Beirut, Tunis, Dar Es Salaam, and Bangkok. During college, she organized screenings of Palestinian films and contributed to the collective making of the “Hani Jawharriyeh Cinema,” which she discusses in a chapter in an upcoming edited volume from the University of California Press. She graduated from college in 2024 with a double major in Philosophy and Islamic Studies, and she is currently based in Amman.

This event is part of the "Cinema Transformations from the Global South" progra

Projects at the Lab: The Cinematheque | All That We Witness presents, in February and April, a series of events that engage the concept of cinema and its role through film practices and productions from the Global South. The program seeks to revisit the meanings and forms of cinematic expression from a perspective that moves beyond the dominant global system shaping film production and circulation, and the formal and thematic frameworks they often impose.