Week 45/2024

Over the past weeks, many of Johan van der Keuken’s early films have been shown as part of Sabzian’s Seeing, Looking, Filming retrospective, presented in collaboration with CINEMATEK. This week, our seventh programme will be screened, featuring two of Van der Keuken’s extraordinary films about blind children. In the second film, Blind Child II (1966), Van der Keuken returns to Herman Slobbe, one of the children from the institute portrayed in Blind Child (1964), who’s now an adolescent. It is in this film that Van der Keuken memorably bids farewell to the subject of his film, reflecting on the fact that everything in cinema, even Herman, is ultimately a form: “Goodbye, gentle form.”

Van der Keuken’s seemingly simple declaration resonates deeply with many filmmakers, especially those behind the camera, who are faced with the fundamental questions of documentary filmmaking. When confronted with today’s images of destruction and suffering, it’s no surprise that different venues and their audiences are drawn to films that bestow dignity upon the “forms” they depict – in stark contrast to the dehumanizing frames that are rampant today. In this light, the rarely screened Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon (1987) by Mai Masri and Jean Khalil Chamoun will be shown at Cinema RITCS. Masri and Chamoun focus on the women who played a crucial role in resisting the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Preserving their stories on camera, Wild Flowers is a film about courage, resistance, and hope.

On Tuesday, KASKcinema and Film-Plateau are hosting filmmaker Fairuz Ghammam. She’ll present a short film programme titled ‘Dreams, Landscape & Borders’, which explores internal and natural spaces. This includes Step by Step (Ossama Mohammed, 1978), a documentary that begins with village children optimistically discussing their dream jobs, but quickly reveals that this innocent hopefulness will not last. Also included is Bamssi (Mourad Ben Amor, 2024), where urgent, Instagram-like images engage in dialogue with family abroad – Mourad and Fairuz, Tunisia and the world. The final film, The Trip (2019), is a road movie through the rugged, majestic landscape between the Texan cities of Marfa and Alpine, with poet Eileen Myles at the wheel offering guidance to its curious passengers.