Space and Memory in the War-Torn City

This special event features eight short films exploring people’s relationships with cities in the Arab world that are being altered and destroyed by conflict. Through the films, we enter the physical and mental landscape of the city, along with the shifting social relationships that accompany such urban transformations. Often the city is a character in its own right, with stories to tell about everyday experiences during turbulent events or the haunting legacy of past wars. The films offer complex and nuanced perspectives generally unavailable in mainstream media reporting of conflict in the Arab world.

Films featured include:

Promenade, Sabine El Chamaa (Lebanon, 2009)
During a war, an elderly woman goes to her own destroyed house and picks one stone at a time, to bring back with her pieces from the walls in her house, which she rebuilds, secretly, in her new room.

Suleima, Jalal Maghout (Syria/Lebanon, 2014)
This animated documentary is derived from the true story of a woman from Damascus. It conjures up Suleima’s memories of childhood, when she was first stirred to resist injustice, and shows the shifting social relationships she experiences during the uprising. It is also a visionary portrait of the city: a haunting mixture of the real and imaginary.

This is the first event in the The Mosaic Rooms’ series Crisis and Creativity: A Season of Contemporary Films from and about the Arab World curated by Shohini Chaudhuri.

Shohini Chaudhuri is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Her publications include Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship (2014) and Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (2005).