As part of the Film Workers for Palestine and Partners Present series, ArteEast, The Solidarity Index, and DCTV co-present this Unpacking the ArteArchive program, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast, curated by Dina A. Ramadan.

After the Hour of Liberation adapts its title from Heiny Srour’s 1974 film, The Hour of Liberation has Arrived, which captured the Marxist-Leninist rebellion against the British in the Dhofar region of Oman as it unfolded. In contrast, the films in this program document the afterlives of revolution; each revisits a resistance movement and centers the women—some infamous, others overlooked—who were at the forefront of these anticolonial struggles. Filmed decades later, freedom fighters from Algeria, Palestine, and Vietnam reflect on their role alongside their male counterparts, as well as their current circumstances and the temporality of liberation. In more recent video works by Marwa Arsanios and Huda Takriti, the artists examine the representations and imaginations of Djamila Bouhired and Leila Khaled respectively, unpacking the simultaneous celebration and marginalization of these women as they are transformed into icons.

Films

RISING ABOVE: WOMEN OF VIETNAM

Dir. Heiny Srour, United Kingdom, 1995, 50 mins, English with English subtitles

In the long years of war against France and the U.S., Vietnamese women fought alongside men as equals. Women such as Madam Binh, who negotiated with Henry Kissinger at the Paris Peace Accords, and later became Vice President of Vietnam, and Mrs. Nguyen Thi Dinh, general and deputy commander of the Vietcong forces, reached the highest positions of power. But 30 years after the signing of the peace agreement, the revival of Confucianism and the spread of market forces are conspiring to relegate women once again to the role of second class citizens. This film looks at what happened to Mrs. Binh and Mrs. Dinh and three other women since the war.

MY NAME IS MEI SHIGENOBU

Dir. Jocelyne Saab, Lebanon, 2018, 7 mins, English with English subtitles

An intimate portrait of Mei Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army in Beirut, Fusako Shigenobu, recorded by the late Jocelyne Saab as her final film.

HAVE YOU EVER KILLED A BEAR - OR BECOMING JAMILA

Dir. Marwa Arsanios, Lebanon, 2014, 25 mins, Arabic with English subtitles

Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila is a video made after a performance whose starting point is an inquiry into Algerian freedom fighter Jamila Bouhired. The research focuses on the different representations of Jamila in cinema, as well as on her assimilation and promotion in the Egyptian cultural magazine Al-Hilal (The Crescent) during the 1960s and '70s. The video also attempts to look at the history of Egyptian socialist projects and the Algerian anti-colonial wars, and the way they have promoted and marginalized feminist projects through the figure of Jamila. Indeed, the clear gender division used to marginalize women in the public sphere was overcome for a short moment during the Algerian war of independence—Jamila becoming its icon. But what does it mean to become an icon, and to play the role of the freedom fighter? Between role playing and political projects, where does the agency of subject constitution sit?

REFUSING TO MEET YOUR EYE

Dir. Huda Takriti, 2022, 13 mins.

August 1969, Leila Khaled and Salim Al-Issawi, two members of the PFLP hijack a flight on its way from Rome to Tel-Aviv, diverting it to Damascus Airport. Leila describes details of the operation and the intentions behind blowing up the empty plane in Damascus in her autobiography, stating that a photographer was waiting at the airport to document the event. Nevertheless, he forgets to take off the cap of his camera lens, and the archive is left with a black photograph. Takriti takes the black photograph as a point of departure for this work, investigating what images can tell us and how we read them in relation to historiography.

Followed by a discussion with Dina Ramadan and Samah Selim

Dina A. Ramadan is a writer and critic based in New York. She teaches at Bard College and the Center for Curatorial Studies. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Samah Selim is a professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. She is a scholar and award-winning translator of modern Arabic literature. Her research focuses on the novel from a comparative and translational perspective, and on twentieth century cultural politics in Egypt. Her most recent translation is The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement in Egypt by 1970s communist militant Arwa Salih. She is currently working on a translation of Egyptian surrealist painter Inji Aflatoun's collected feminist writings.