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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‘Hunger’ (2008; Steve McQueen) chronicles the final months of Bobby Sands, in Belfast’s infamous Maze Prison, where fellow IRA inmates are refusing to wear standard prison-issue uniforms as a protest against Britain’s refusal to recognize them as “Political Prisoners”. With an epic eye for detail, this is the first feature film from artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen. As the protest fails to get results, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), decides to take a different approach and begins a hunger strike until the IRA are recognized as a legitimate political organization.