R21 aka Restoring Solidarity
Friday 26 April at 20:00.
Cinematheque Beirut and the Sursock Museum are happy to present R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022) by Mohanad Yaqubi on Friday 26 April at 20:00. The film will be screened in Lebanon for the first time and will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, over Zoom, moderated by Samar Kanafani.
R21 aka Restoring Solidarity
Dir. Mohanad Yaqubi, 2022
71’, Palestine, Belgium, Qatar
In Arabic and Japanese with English subtitles
Producer: Idioms Film in collaboration with Escautville, Sak a Do and Kitchen BXL
R21 comes as an addition to and a reflection on a collection of twenty 16mm films, safeguarded in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine. It’s an undelivered solidarity letter written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during the film.
R21 aka Restoring Solidarity acts as a catalog, the film as a time machine, the film as an archive. The themes that Reel no. 21 deals with, reveal themselves in the form of a montage essay. At the same time, the act of restoring these films brings out motives, aspirations, and the disappearance of a generation and its struggles, not only in Japan, but around the world.
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah based production house, Idioms Film, as well as of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films that focuses on militant film practices. He is also a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute, that focus on supporting, promoting, and preserving Palestinian cinema. He has been a resident researcher at The School of the Art (KASK) in Gent, Belgium since 2017. Yaqubi’s first feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2016) made its premiere at TIFF, Berlinale, Cinéma du réel, Dubai IFF, and Yamagata.
Samar Kanafani is a social anthropologist residing and working in Beirut. Her research explores the tactics of dwelling under precarious conditions at the intersection of ruined and renewed urban spaces in Beirut.
Cinematheque Beirut, is a project by Metropolis Cinema. The Cinematheque Beirut project is dedicated to researching, conserving, and disseminating heritage and contemporary Lebanese film. Through the creation of tools, content and platforms that are accessible to as many people as possible, the project objective is to highlight the rich diversity of this heritage.