Screening and Discussion: Subversive Film, Tokyo Reels

Screening and Discussion: Subversive Film, Tokyo Reels
Thursday, November 21, 8pm (doors 7:30pm) at Now Instant Image Hall (939 Chung King Road, LA 90012)

Tickets: $15 purchase here

Still from The Road to a Palestinian State (Overseas Reporting: Middle East Today | Episode 1), 1974, prod. NHK (The Japan Broadcasting Corporation). Image capture by Subversive Film; Tokyo Reels. Image by Subversive Film.

JOAN presents a selection of works from Subversive Film Collective’s 2022 project titled Tokyo Reels, a collection of twenty inventories of 16mm film reels that constitute a collection kept and safeguarded by members of a Japanese Palestine solidarity group in Tokyo. The program will open with an introduction by researcher and writer Kristine Khouri, and will conclude with a discussion with the audience, moderated by Khouri.

Tokyo Reels is a multi-faceted archival project that explores the production of images and narratives in the framework of international solidarity between Japan and Palestine from the 1960s to the 1980s. The collection includes the film reels, as well as tens of Umatic tapes, dozens of posters, and more. The first output of the project is focused on an essay film and several publications. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, the films from the collection become juxtaposed with other archival images from Japan, reclaiming the imaginary of an international solidarity movement.

Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective founded by Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi. The collective aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Ramallah and Brussels.

Over the years, the films produced through and by Subversive Film have been screened at Toronto International Film Festival; Berlinale; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Carthage Film Festival, Tunis; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; and Viennale, Vienna, among others.

Film Program:

The Road to a Palestinian State (Overseas Reporting: Middle East Today | Episode 1), NHK (The Japan Broadcasting Corporation), 1974, 29 min, Japan

The first episode of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation’s Middle East Today television mini-series (December 1974–February 1975), The Road to a Palestine State reports on the future of a Palestinian state following the international recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. The episode opens with Yasser Arafat’s speech at the UN in 1974. Throughout the film, the reporter meets and speaks to a Palestinian doctor, a community organizer and members of political factions, particularly from the leftist PFLP and DFLP, to show the disagreements within the internal politics of the PLO. We see shots from the streets of Beirut, the city and refugee camps, to relay the sense of the everyday life of Palestinians following the international recognition of the PLO. 

Cowboy, Sami Al-Salamoni, 1973, 15 min, Egypt

Cowboy begins from American cinema, as an exposure of the country’s settler colonial structure and its ability to depict genocidal acts through camera framing. The film, directed by the renowned Egyptian film critic Sami Al-Salamoni, reflects his theoretical critique of Hollywood through heavily edited scenes and shots from mainstream motion pictures. Al-Salamoni manages to take the audience through the history of commercialized image production towards a transnational solidarity image production as a response.

Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973, 13 min, (from exile in) Lebanon

A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film.