The 17th Forum Expanded program is currently being put together, but the 16th edition is not yet fully over. Two films unable to be screened during the summer special due to their length are now being shown with their filmmakers in attendance.
SABA’ SANAWAT HAWL DELTA AL-NEEL (Seven Years Around the Nile Delta, Egypt 2020, 12.12.) by Sharief Zohairy invites viewers on a five-and-a-half-hour journey: during his childhood and adolescence, Zohairy used to travel four times a year with his father from Alexandria, where he went to school, to Al-Zarqa, where he was born. The journey used to take three hours and passes through agricultural roads that link together the remote regions of Lower Egypt. Following a year of political instability in Egypt, Zohairy decided in 2012 to travel along this route once again and document it with his video camera. The result of his eight-year journey is a mixture of road movie and travelogue and shows the diversity of 32 towns and villages in the Nile delta as well as everyday life in a region threated by pollution.
BLACK BACH ARTSAKH (Ayreen Anastas und Rene Gabri, Armenia/USA 2021, 18.12.) is a cinematic construction. The film is based on interviews with the population of Nagorno-Karabakh during a trip in 2007, that is, between two wars. As in their previous films shown at Forum Expanded, Anastas and Gabri work with different historical levels of time: while they’ve previously edited and presented their films live, this time they use temporal distance to reappraise old material. Taking their bearings from Straub/Huillet and Pasolini’s use of the music of J. S. Bach, they experiment with the promise of his compositions. “Black Bach Artsakh is the name of a world. It lives in and as a film. Those who view it not only inhabit it, but also care for it, keep it alive by keeping watch over it. In this way, it is not a film which so much resists the makers of war and those who deny and continue to justify genocide: it is a film which outlives them.“ (Anastas/Gabri) This screening happens in parallel to a Conference in Shards: Thinking Out of the White Box, which in each of its iterations, is an attempt to open the expanded space of conversations, questions and exigencies which the film emerges from and engages with. The conference will be taking place on the 18th and 19th of December at SAVVY Contemporary as part of the multi-chapter program of moving image practices, Sensible Grounds, curated by Azar Mahmoudian. (stss)
