**Prismatic Ground 2024 virtual exclusive**
CINEMATEK restoration co-presented by Bidoun

Ma'loul is a Palestinian village in Galilee which was destroyed by the Israeli armed forces in 1948. Its inhabitants were driven out and expropriated. All that remains of the village are two churches and a mosque, the last visible traces for travellers between Haifa and Nazareth. Over the years, they too disappeared, under a forest planted in memory of the victims of Nazism. The Israeli authorities thus wiped off the map hundreds of Arab villages.

But the former inhabitants of Ma'loul have created a new tradition: that of going for a picnic one day a year on the site of their destroyed village, paradoxically on the day of the independence of the State of Israel. It is the day of the picnic that we filmed; the encounter with a stone, a window, a wall, an olive or a pomegranate tree... hidden under the woods. A peasant notes among the young pines certain uncertain landmarks of his lost universe. A family comments with a naive purity on the mural fresco of their village, painted according to traces from their memory. As required by the official Israeli curriculum, a teacher explains to his Arab students the history of the creation of the State of Israel… These are elements of reality that confront each other and make up the film; they allow us to pose a new dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that of time. —Michel Khleifi

The naked body of the pregnant mother. The voice of the daughter. Inside-outside. A song to life.

THE MOTHER (fragment of a text by Angelidi, which accompanied the film at its first screenings): The twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year nineteen-eighty was the day before I gave birth to my second child, my son. I. Naked. To come to terms with my fear, I felt the desire to immerse myself into black water, to re-emerge and cuddle my belly. A remembering forgetfulness that to die giving birth is like being born dying.

THE DAUGHTER (fragment from the text by Walldén, which is spoken in the film): I return to my second self. Her smell. Mine. The centre I immerse in. Safety is a smell. And I rest. Calmness. The touch. In my head the buzz stops. In her smell, I rest.

—Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén

**Prismatic Ground 2024 virtual exclusive**

In 2014, an unknown man in Ukraine tattooed a portrait of a relative of a filmmaker in his traditional Native American regalia. Stitched together from footage of the search for this man, the film interrogates what happens when the control of an image is lost and the time’s circular ironies. —Adam Piron

**Prismatic Ground 2024 virtual exclusive**

All personal archival VHS engaging with a core question of artists in times of chaos: who owns a memory and what is its value? A record of the queer Midwest. Drugs, sex, love, friendship, and a failed Los Angeles movie deal. —Liz Roberts

'Landscape Suspended' tracks the story of an “interrogation” through the footages from Shahoo mountain, a mountain in Kurdistan of Iran which hosts nomadic Kurdish tribe called Havar Neshins and Kurdish guerrillas. This film’s images are a kind of revelation through visual interrogation, revealing the perception of the socio-political history and violence that surround the people in the mountainous area.Through landscape as its approach, this film tries to uncover spatial justice by observing the living space of the Havar Neshins, identified based on the complexity of the landscape in which they reside. —Naghmeh Abbasi

Constructed out of personal poems and notes, xиӈкэлтэн poses questions about image production's intersection with creation of narratives, that are embedded now in our perception of contemporaneity and manifest themselves in our performances of ideas and feelings like love. Positioned in the Yakutian Arctic, this visual essay invites the viewer to ask vital questions in relation to peripheral discourse that seems to be inseparable in relation to the etymology of the word itself - Arctic, and how does the western ontologies in relation to intimacy are fitting in immediate Yakutian realities. —Svetlana Romanova

Through the ears of an acoustic engineer, the film explores how in the near silence of the anechoic chamber, listening is a straining toward understanding and connection. It engages with cinema as a body — one given presence and depth through sound — and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback. —Dominic Bonelli, Eislow Johnson

By way of Atlanta, Georgia’s railway, oral histories from local rideshare drivers with urban landscapes uncover the post-industrial American South and its fraught history with labor and space.
—Demetrius Antonio Lewis

A short-film about my uncle, a retired greco-roman wrestling olympian living atop a decommissioned landfill. In “The World Of Wrestling” Roland Barthes uses the phrase "unspeakable heap" to describe the wrestler's flesh at the moment of defeat spread out on the floor. A heap also recalls the shape of waste and a structure that rises to a climax only to slope down again towards the ground. For the ground is the surface that marks the difference between victory and defeat, the living and the dead, and the present and the past.
—Kara Ditte Hansen

A one take recording of a family's visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.
—Xiaolu Wang

The site is pretty easy to find. So says the young woman who has been filming an outing to her grandmother’s grave. Along the way, she and her extended family happen upon an imam on the road. Smiling, he offers them his services, and in a long, unbroken shot, they drive him to the gravesite to chant. The route is orderly, the car new and softly beeping, the family plot well-tended, if a little dusty. But the journey is twistier than it first seems. The woman, the filmmaker, explains to the imam that she is from the United States. Later, she reveals that her grandmother once appeared to her in a dream. Each turn is another opportunity to lose one’s bearings, for time to slip past, for languages and customs to become strange. What might seem mundane becomes remarkable in its unlikeliness: a distant family reuniting at a leaf-strewn grave. —Genevieve Yue

A documentary portrait of twenty-year-old Amie Lowe, whose father disappeared during Yahya Jammeh’s violent dictatorship in The Gambia when she was only 3 years old. The personal portrait that emerged illuminates the intimate and small in the interminable wake of unresolved loss. —Aminata Ndow

A meditation on the image and the bullet. Entrance Wounds considers the modern challenge of trying to unsee an image. The film sifts through moments of the everyday, imagining a world where afterimages of disaster drift in near-transparency over the present. —Calum Walter

"Entrance Wounds conveys a global freeze, a narrative trapped in ice, as we waver between horror and numbness. It generates a feeling of logic suspended, as tragedy ceases to register as an event. Grief is amoebic. It fills the space around us like a deadly gas." —Michael Sicinski

A documentary readymade about family lore and chocolate biscuits. —Charlie Shackleton

A filmmaker explores astrophysical metaphors to make sense of a failed relationship to person and place.
—Bentley Brown

The "bleared eyes of blue glass" in the title of this experimental short expand on a verbal image from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, considered the most experimental among the 20th-century British writer's literary works, from which the young filmmaker took inspiration for his film, borrowing passages and visions to explain his own understanding of what cinema is. A film that plays with water - precisely - and light, and yet in a very dark b&w lit up by rare flashes of colour, making a journey in the night in which the shadow of a man gradually acquires substance. —PARK Kyujae

Both an intimate family portrait & cinematic collage of Black and trans collective memory and (be)longing, meditating on themes of safety, bodily autonomy and generations of compounding loss across time and media.

Taking the form of a diptych, the first act interrogates the convergence of Black confrontations with police brutality and the annually increasing disparities of homicidal violence experienced by Black trans women and femmes, while the second act non-linearly traces the respective origins and evolutions of a Black non-binary trans femme scholar-artist and her late father who died unexpectedly ten years prior to filming. Organized around family VHS footage, viral media and found footage, present-day video diary using digital as well as Bolex 16mm cameras, performance, and other artifacts of an inherited personal and public archive, the film explores the continuities and cleavages of the filmmaker and her father's corresponding lived experiences, amidst the backdrop of unrelenting anti-Black, queer- and trans-antagonistic acts of violence, both state-sanctioned and otherwise and the aftermath of a deadly global pandemic. The film stands as an open-ended inquiry into what Frantz Fanon once called “the problem of time” for figuring Black life, collectivity and struggle—where past, present, blood kin and queer kin kaleidoscopically collide.

—æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil

Centuries prior to the colonization of the Americas, Purple Martins began to nest in gourds that people hung to store food and water and became companion species for many tribes. The birds that European settlers brought with them drove Purple Martins out of their wild habitats so that now they can only nest in birdhouses that people build to prevent their extinction. Without dialogue or narration, Homing follows the migration of Purple Martins from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, between the conservationists who study them and to the houses they are dependent on for survival. —Tamer Hassan