Summer Cinema: Rematerialising the Archive

Jameel’s Summer Cinema, organised in collaboration with The Culturist Film Club and curated by Hind Mezaina, is a season of free-to-attend films about cities, archives, and the ways we live and remember together. Audiences are encouraged to engage in “collective viewing” – each screening includes informal talks with filmmakers, artists, and special guests – and food and refreshments will be available.

This programme brings together two experimental films that reflect on colonial and corporate archives, showing how they can reveal and distort, illuminate and erase.

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing: dir Theo Panagopoulos (2024, 17 min –still above)

A filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen film archive of silent colour films of Palestinian wildflowers made in the 1930s and 1940s by Scottish missionaries in British-occupied Palestine and decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.

Scenes of Extraction: dir Sanaz Sohrabi (2023, 43 min)

 This essay film takes the viewer on an archival stroll into the British Petroleum Archives to unearth the still and moving images that documented this expansive colonial network of geological explorations across Iran between 1901 and 1951, It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the ‘reflection deismograph’ method of oil exploration, and traces the technical and social entanglement between the infrastructures of oil and the camera during the operations of British Petroleum across the Iranian oil belt.

Following the screening Hind Mezaina will be in conversation with archivist and researcher Jasmine Soliman.