The Museum of Impossible Forms is pleased to announce a twinned series of events exploring Migrant Screen Cultures led by Anat Pick and Minou Norouzi.
May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War) + A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints)Anat and Minou will each host a reading circle and present films relating to their respective research in cinema studies.
The reading circles are restricted to registered participants.
The screenings don’t require registration.
The series forms part of the research project “Revolutionary Patience: Migrant Perspectives on Doing Politics with the Documentary” funded by Kone Foundation.
PROGRAMME 1
Sylvain George: May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War) (2010), 150’
Ayesha Hameed: A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) (2016), 9’50”
Film screening + Q&A with the filmmakers
Saturday November 20, 2021 from 17:00 - 20:30
Two films in dialogue on the lives of migrants at the northern French port town of Calais. Film program curated by Anat PickMay They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War) (2010), 150’
Director: Sylvain George
Film screening + Q&A with the filmmaker, present in-person
For three years, Sylvain George filmed undocumented immigrants from Northern Africa and the Middle East living in makeshift homes in the northern French port town of Calais.
Their moods slip from hope to despair as they encounter institutionalized intolerance and racism. George places the refugees' marginal existence center stage, filming the rituals of their exile -- bathing, singing, eating, dodging the police -- with a sympathetic immediacy, part verité, part poetry.
A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) (2016), 9’50”
Director: Ayesha Hameed
Screening + Q&A with the filmmaker,
present in-person
A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) is a 16mm film essay that looks at the coalescence of skin and data in the collection and destruction of fingerprints, examining the life and circulation of the fingerprint in a speculative history that travels from border checks to early gestures in film. It explores the “jungle” migrant camp near Calais.
BIOS
Sylvain George is a filmmaker, director and writer, graduate in philosophy, law and political science, and cinema (PARIS I, PARIS IX, EHESS). Since 2006, he has been making poetic, political and experimental films on the themes of immigration and social movements. He also collaborates with renown, politically committed artists and musicians, including Archie Shepp, William Parker, Valérie Dréville, Okkyung Lee, John Edwards, John Butcher, Serge Teyssot-Gay, and Sylvain Luc.Retrospectives of George’s work have been held at the Cinémathéque Française, Filmmaker Film festival, Doc’s Kingdom, Subversive Festival, Cinémathèque de Lubljana, Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Punto de vista, Musea Reina Sofia (2018), EDOC (2019), and Pupil, Kino in der Uni. In 2012, he was guest filmmaker at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York.
For further information on Sylvain George’s filmography, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvain_George
Ayesha Hameed lives in London, UK. Since 2014 Hameed’s multi-chapter project ‘Black Atlantis’ has looked at the Black Atlantic and its afterlives in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems and in outer space.
Through videos, audio essays and performance lectures, she examines how to think through sound, image, water, violence and history as elements of an active archive; and time travel as an historical method. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021).
Hameed is currently Co-Programme Leader of the PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London, and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Anat Pick is author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn, 2013). She has published widely on animals, veganism, ethics and film. Her new book project is on the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil and cinema. Anat is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2021-22).
