PFFA: Shorts Programme
Shorts Programme: The Melancholy Of This Useless Afternoon
- FILM TITLE: The melancholy of this useless afternoon chapter one
Director: Dina Mimi
Year of Production: 2023
Duration: 12 min.
Spoken language: English
Subtitles: English
THE MELANCHOLY OF THIS USELESS AFTERNOON: CHAPTER 1 (2023), directed by Dina Mimi, explores the roles of the fugitive and the smuggler. Chapter one sets imagery from birdsong competitions against revolutionary songs from Oman, Yemen, and Palestine, with a meditative narrative centred on themes of movement, loss, separation, womanhood, the body, and revolutionary practice.
- FILM TITLE: And Yet My Mask Is Powerful
Director: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Year of Production: 2016
Duration: 8 min.
Spoken language: None
Subtitles: English and Arabic embedded texts
AND YET MY MASK IS POWERFUL (2016), directed by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abu-Rahme, is an installation piece documenting a modern engagement with ancient material: relics of neolithic masks found in the West Bank and their replication as 3D-printed models. As the film follows groups of young people revisiting wrecked ruins in Israel, the destroyed sites are not merely seen as places of ruin or trauma; instead, they emerge with a renewed sense of vitality and presence facilitated by their costuming of the old and new masks. By reactivating these spaces, they resist colonial erasures and move towards a counter-mythology of virtual reappearance.
- FILM TITLE: As We Cross to the Other Side of the Garden
Director: Ameen Abo-Kaseem
Year of Production: 2023
Duration: 14 min
Spoken language: Arabic
Subtitles: English
AS WE CROSS TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GARDEN (2023), directed by Ameen Abo-Kaseem, brings us to late 2018 when the war in the streets of Damascus had stopped. In this narrative short, a generation ready to start their fight against (or for) life soon realise that this just turned out to be a beautiful, unrealistic dream.
- FILM TITLE: our songs were ready for all wars to come
Director: Noor Abed
Year of Production: 2021
Duration: 21 min
Spoken Language: Arabic
Subtitles: English
OUR SONGS WERE READY FOR ALL WARS TO COME (2021), directed by Noor Abed, acts as a compass in the search for alternative sources of Palestinian knowledge. Lamenting folklore performances reminiscent of women’s communal rituals at water wells are overlaid with lyrics of traditional folk songs. Through splashes of light and perforated edges of celluloid film, Abed negotiates ways of representing and holding memory.
- FILM TITLE: A Night We Held Between
Director: Noor Abed
Year of Production: 2024
Duration: 30 min.
Spoken Language: Arabic (song)
Subtitles: English
A NIGHT WE HELD BETWEEN (2024), directed by Noor Abed, weaves together the ancient Minoan Labyrinth myth with the present sociopolitical context of Palestine. The film unfolds across historical sites in Palestine where the landscape is posited as a central character, as a timeless holder of memory, and as a capsule for feelings of loss and destruction. In rhythmic rituals evoking ancient practices linked to deities and caves, communal expression of land, and cultural heritage, Abed disrupts linear perceptions of historical time and poetically merges the past with the present.
This film is part of Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam.