I signed the petition
One morning in Berlin, the filmmaker accidentally wakes his friend in England with a phone call, because he’s worried. The previous evening, he signed a petition for a cultural boycott of Israel, but was that actually such a good idea? As a Palestinian, he’s already treated with suspicion. Despite being half awake, his friend embarks on a lucid monologue; in just a few minutes, he brilliantly analyzes the fear, alienation and powerlessness of the filmmaker. As Palestinians in exile, they don’t have the luxury of keeping a distance, he says. “You’re already in it, do you know what I mean? Whether or not you sign a piece of paper doesn’t actually matter.”
The camera roams shakily around a sunny room somewhere in Berlin, one minute focusing on the window, the next on an empty corner. The grainy images suggest that the person behind the camera isn’t really there, but somewhere else.
Director: Mahdi Fleifel
Country: UK, Germany, Switzerland
Year: 2018
Length: 10 min
Cinematography: Mahdi Fleifel
Editing: Michael Aaglund
Production: Patrick Campbell / Nakba Filmworks, Mahdi Fleifel / Nakba Filmworks
Summa
A young Belarusian artist leaves her husband behind in Minsk to visit her friend, the elderly painter Andrzej Strumillo, in his idyllic manor house in Poland. It’s a fairy-tale place, surrounded by marshland and a river. There are horses, for which the two artists share a passion, as well as dogs. It has been two years since her last visit. For her, the trip offers a welcome diversion from city life; for him, it’s a break from a lonely existence marked by old age: a curved spine, painful knees. “It’s sad life’s so short,” he says.
The artists talk about art and life, animals and trees, love and what they’ve been dreaming. The pleasant routine of drawing, talking, horse-riding and chores around the house is interrupted only by calls from the artist’s husband, who wants her to come home. But she wants to stay longer—she isn’t finished here yet. What she finds here is also what the calm pacing of this film and its carefully composed images offer us: space for contemplation.
Director: Andrei Kutsila
Country: Poland, Belarus
Year: 2018
Length: 51 min
Cinematography: Andrei Kutsila
Editing: Andrei Kutsila, Pawel Klepacz
Production: Miroslaw Dembinski for Film Studio Everest
- Age limit: null
Showtimes:
- Cinema Artis, hall 2: Sunday 03.02 - 18:30