Darat al Funun is pleased to present a film series curated by Emily Jacir to run concurrently with her exhibition at Darat al Funun. Over the course of three months Jacir will be presenting a series of seven pivotal films which have influenced her and her practice, or which her work is in dialogue with. Her work investigates personal and collective movement through public space and its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean space and time, in particular between Italy and Palestine.

Besides her own films and videos, Jacir has a long history with cinema from curating some of the first Arab and Palestinian Film programs for NYC with Alwan for the Arts between 1999 – 2002, to conceiving of and co-curating the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. She also curated a selection of shorts, “Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 -1982)” which went on tour in 2007. Select film juries that Jacir has served on include Visions du Reel Festival international du cinéma (2014), Berlinale Shorts International Jury (2012), and the Cinema XXI Jury Rome Film Festival (2012).

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In ‘Nostalgia for the Light’ (2010) Patricio Guzman travels 10,000 feet above sea level to Chile’s Atacama Desert, where astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent that it allows them to see right to the edges of the universe. The Atacama is also a place where the harsh heat of the sun keeps human remains intact: those of Pre-Columbian mummies; 19th century explorers and miners; as well as political prisoners “disappeared” by the Chilean army after the 1973 military coup. Women, surviving relatives of these disappeared whose bodies were dumped here, are continuing to search after twenty-five years, for the remains of their loved ones and reclaim their families’ histories. Language: Spanish, with Arabic subtitles.