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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‘The Dupes (Al makhdu’un)’ (1972; Tawfiq Saleh) is based on the 1962 novella Men in the Sun by slain Palestinian writer, artist, and resistance leader Ghassan Kanafani, and is one of the first Arab films to tackle the Palestinian issue. It is set in 1958, where three Palestinians meet in Basra, Iraq, on their way to Kuwait where they hope to make a living and survive after the Nakba of 1948. The three men, from different generations, represent different perspectives on the Palestine issue. With the films striking imagery and metaphors, Saleh, like Kanafani, criticizes the reactionary Arab states, consumerist Gulf oil countries, sterile diplomacy, and the brutal Zionist occupation.