lumbung Film: After Cinema #3

This event is part of Meydan #3: next to the lumbung Film program, it includes a Harvest Festival, lumbung Kios pop-up market, RomaMoMA Street Festival, and more.

lumbung Film: AFTER CINEMA #3

A screening and performance program

Is the experience of the cinematic form an intimate or a collective one? Does a film stop with its last frame, or does it actually begin when the lights of the theater turn on? This event series provides a stage to encounter these questions on site and invites a group of writers, visual and sonic artists to perform, reflect, depict, present, and harvest the images, sounds, words, and moods which they have encountered after having watched a compilation of films from the lumbung Film archive.

The 93-minute film program, conceived by Azin Feizabadi, includes six fictional, documentary, poetic, essayistic, and experimental short films from the lumbung Film archive. The focus is on the extent to which going to the cinema is a collective experience and what happens after leaving the cinema.

Following the screening (the program will be repeated Friday through Sunday), varying performances by Setareh Shahbazi and Neda Saeedi (visual artists), Cat Woywod (sound and improvisation artist), Tanasgol Sabbagh (poet and spoken word performer), and Haytham El Wardany (writer) will be presented in response to this question.

Program on Sunday, September 11, 2022

starting at 5 pm

• I Feel Nothing (8 min.) by Jumana Emil Abboud, UK, 2012
• Leafcutter (27 min.) by Liam Morgan, Taiwan/Canada, 2022
• Blindness of Love (2 min.) by Yazan Khalili, Palestine, 2013
• Eleven Men (28 min.) by Nguyen Trinh Thi, Vietnam, 2018
• Ensaio Ilú Obá de Min (2 min.) by Graziela Kunsch, Brazil, 2015
• Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (25 min.) by Marwa Arsanios, Lebanon, 2014

Language: Arabic and Vietnamese with English subtitles, total 93 min.

After Cinema: Breaking the Spell: Reading and spoken word poetry by Tanasgol Sabbagh and Haytham El Wardany in German, Arabic, and English (25 min.)

About the films

A compilation of fiction, poetry, essayistic, and experimental short films on the Dynamics of Relationships—between human and nature, human and human, the camera and the subject, or a character and its self—which can absorb “love” and “pain” at the same time.

I feel nothing (8 min., by Jumana Emil Abboud, UK, 2012)

A video-poem, an investigation into the sense of touch. A relationship is recounted, though remains ambiguous if it is between a man and a woman, life and death, the past and the present, or an individual and a homeland.

Leafcutter (27 min., by Liam Morgan, Taiwan/Canada, 2022)

Told through the language of slow cinema and magical realism, Leafcutter follows the isolation of two strangers who are in one place but separated. It tells of their relationship, and the relationship of each to their urban and the natural environment. 

Blindness of Love (2 min., by Yazan Khalili, Palestine, 2013)

Flickering. Frame by frame. One long sentence word by word in a fast rhythm. This video is based on photos that were exposed to excess light, leaving a whiteness that witnesses the details of a disappeared love. “How does one regard the pain of the self?”

Eleven Men (28 min., by Nguyen Trinh Thi, Vietnam, 2018)

An adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story “Eleven Sons” (1919), the found footage film Eleven Men composes scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films—mostly produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio—featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh, and eleven of her co-actors as her fictional lovers.

Ensaio Ilú Obá de Min (2 min., by Graziela Kunsch, Brazil, 2015)

With the increasingly intense privatization of public space and compulsory hospitalization of crack users as its backdrop, this video records a group rehearsal of Ilu Oba de Min percussion group in Vale do Anhangabaú, São Paulo, with the camera turned back to a trans woman who inhabits the area and claims the picture.

Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (25 min., by Marwa Arsanios, Lebanon, 2014)

We look at the back issues of the pan-Arab culture magazine Al-Hilal, which, during the Algerian War, frequently praised the revolutionary and freedom fighter Djamila Bouhired as a model of Arab womanhood. An actress designated to play her role is showing the magazine’s covers to the camera. From the different representations of Djamila in cinema to her assimilation and promotion through the magazine, the performance reveals the history of socialist projects in Egypt, anti- colonial wars in Algeria, and the way they have promoted and marginalized feminist projects.

About the performing writers

Tanasgol Sabbagh, is a Berlin-based poet. Her work situates itself between stage and page poetry and takes shape in form of embodied performances, audio pieces, video installations, and musical collaborations. In 2017 she co-founded the artist collective parallelgesellschaft, an event series dedicated to exploring the spectrum of the creative and the political beyond the standards of German dominant culture. Together with poet Josefine Berkholz she founded and hosts the auditive literature magazine Stoff aus Luft: A format that tries to examine the poetics of spoken and sound-based literature, rendering it more visible outside the often restricting frame of print.

Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator, living and working in Berlin and Cairo. In The Book Of Sleep (Al-Karma 2017, Seagull Books 2020) he explores the dialectics of sleep and vigilance in the context of social protests. How To Disappear (Kayfa Ta 2013-2017) focuses on modes of listening, and attempts to explore the potentialities of passive activities. El-Wardany’s practice combines fiction writings, essays, prose, theory, poetical, and experimental writings. In 2021 he received the City of Berlin stipend for literature, and the Cairo International Book Fair Award for best short stories collection of the year for his most recent book Irremediable 2021.

lumbung Film: AFTER CINEMA is conceived by Azin Feizabadi

Azin Feizabadi is a filmmaker, visual artist, and a DJ for a cause. His feature film debut UCHRONIA was released in 2019, the same year the book After Cinema – Fictions from A Collective Memory published by Archive Books. The publication marked the ten year anniversary of his long-term project A Collective Memory and it includes experimental essays, short stories, poems, and screenplays by Nanna Heidenreich, Ashkan Sepahvand, Jan Verowert, Sarah Rifky, Rasha Salti, and Shahab Fotouhi. Azin Feizabadi is a member of the Berlinale Shorts selection committee and the programming team for the Kassel Video and Documentary Film Festival.

Directions