Summer Film Series: A Night of Short Films

Tuesday | 2 June | 6:30 p.m. 
Directors: Omar Robert Hamilton, Basma Al-Sharif, Kamal Aljafari / Total RT: 71 minutes / 2009 – 2013
Though I Know the River is Dry weaves together familiar themes of Palestine: the division of families, the role of the past and the notion of return. Evocative, elegant visuals are guided by the main character’s voiceover narration, an intimate soliloquy of regret for the choices that brought him to leave his country and resolve in his return. | By Omar Robert Hamilton / 11 minutes / 2013. 
Home Movies Gaza “introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video installation claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.” | By Basma Al-Sharif / 24 minutes / 2012.
O Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian militant film, Our Small Houses, into a performance possible only through film — one that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism. | By Basma Al-Sharif / 12 minutes / 2013.
Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza to travel between different sights of modern ruin, from an ancient civilization embedded in a modern civilization in ruins (Athens), to the derelict buildings of anonymous sites (Malta) and a site that is post-civilization (the Gaza Strip). Shot while under self-hypnosis. | By Basma Al-Sharif / 13 minutes / 2014.
Balconies  is an experimental meditation focusing on the deteriorating and unfinished balconies of Kamal Aljafari’s home town Ramleh, inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s Romance Sonambulo, ‘But now I am not I, nor is my house now my house…’” | By Kamal Aljafari / 11 minutes / 2009.