As part of our Film Workers for Palestine and Partners Present series, ArteEast, The Solidarity Index, and DCTV co-present ArteEast's Unpacking the Artearchive program. I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile presents several films that blend fiction and documentary practices in their profiles of writers living in exile. From Paul Bowles to James Baldwin and Mahmoud Darwish, the writers in these films are either onscreen presences or spectral conduits for reflecting on the heterogenous aspects of diasporic identity. Spanning from Beirut to Paris, and Istanbul to Tangier, the program generates several connective threads that transcend time and space, complicating rigid notions of national identity and venerating the potency of the written word as instrumental to a dialectic that’s fundamentally rooted in affirming human dignity. There will be a post-screening discussion between authors in exile and curators.

I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile is curated by Nick Kouhi. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast.

MEN OF MY DREAMS

Dir. Gelare Khoshgozaran, U.K, 2020, 10 mins.

English with English subtitles

Commissioned by Cell Project Space in London, UK, the film is part of Queer Correspondence, a mail art initiative curated by Eliel Jones. Distributed in a bespoke USB drive, Men of My Dreams unfolds a series of vignettes that toy with the unstable ground between fact and fiction. Thinking about this past as being materially present in fragments of knowledge carried by the body, Men of My Dreams delves into the artist’s personal history by invoking a group of men that surrounded the artist through their writing, singing, filming and activism while growing up in Tehran and moving to the US, including: writers Edward Said and Roberto Bolaño; poet Federico Garcia Lorca; filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini; singer Farhad Mehrad; Iranian journalist and poet Khosrow Golesorkhi; and also Saeed, her father.

OFF-WHITE TULIPS (Kırık Beyaz Laleler)

Dir. Aykan Safoğlu, Turkey, Germany, 2014, 24 mins.

Turkish with English subtitles

Concentrating on James Baldwin’s extended stays in Istanbul in 60’s and 70’s, the film explores the limits of an autobiography mostly relying on found materials such as Sedat Pakay’s photography. Racism, transnational discourses, queer politics and appropriation art are also being investigated throughout the video-essay. Off-White Tulips is conceived as a fictional dialogue with James Baldwin that focuses on his prolonged stay in Istanbul. Found documents and re-signified objects are manipulated to layer Baldwin’s identity as a black gay author with the narrator’s personal history. The associative narrative extends with references to Turkish and American pop-icons, investigations into etymology and self-reflexive comments on visual representation towards a situated critique of racism.

MAHMOUD DARWISH: THE LAND AS LANGUAGE

Dirs. Simone Bitton + Elias Sanbar, France, 1998, 60 mins.

Arabic & English with English subtitles

This documentary is the result of a collaboration between director Simone Bitton and historian Elias Sanbar. It follows the esteemed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as he journeys from the Cisjordanian desert to Paris, passing through Cairo and Beirut, retracing the path of his exile. Through this film, Bitton and Sanbar evoke the profound sense of isolation and the collective wound experienced by a people separated from their homeland—a feeling that resonates deeply within Darwish's work.