For Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, De Cinema screens They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974) and The Dream (Mohammad Malas, 1987). Abu Ali’s landmark of Palestinian revolutionary cinema juxtaposes everyday life under occupation with armed resistance, connecting the Palestinian struggle to a wider history of colonialism and imperialism. Filmed in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, Malas’s documentary The Dream records the dreams of Palestinians of different generations. Here, the boundary between the lived and the imagined becomes blurred: war and displacement seep into the most ordinary desires, while the dream of returning to Palestine and living there with dignity persists. The screening is part of an international initiative by Filmlab Palestine to keep Palestinian stories in view. Admission is free.
In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), a Warsaw theatre company finds its craft entangled with the realities of Nazi occupation. As acting becomes a means of deception and resistance, the distinction between performance and reality grows increasingly unstable. Lubitsch’s comedy considers what art can do when power itself becomes a dangerous theatrical spectacle.
Kinograph devotes its November programme to two films by Agnès Varda: Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) and Sans toit ni loi (1985). The latter begins with the discovery of a young woman’s frozen body and reconstructs her final weeks through the recollections of those she encountered. Mona remains elusive, resisting the social expectations that seek to make her legible. Moving through the landscapes of southern France, she exposes the tensions between freedom and exclusion, belonging and homelessness. In Cléo de 5 à 7, a young singer awaits medical test results, gradually confronting the difference between being looked at and truly seeing the world around her.
