WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > FOCUS: NOOR ABED

HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 4 MAY
19:30 – 21:00 / 57′ + Q&A

BUY TICKETS

Noor Abed will be present for the Q&A.

The films in this programme have descriptive subtitles. The introduction and Q&A will have BSL interpretation.

Content warning: contains flashing imagery; depiction of animal carcasses, needles.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Rachael Disbury

In the timeless, transfixing brilliance of Noor Abed’s films, history is a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act. Working across and between performance, fiction and documentary, Abed weaves folklore, indigenous knowledge and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine. In the trilogy of films in this Focus programme, in defiance of colonial power, the artist builds vivid atmospheres of permanence, longevity and longing – to animate Palestinian identity, autonomy and survival.

Abed’s lens is empowering and unwavering in Penelope (2014), whose title evokes the maritally loyal character of Homer’s Odyssey, who waits 20 years for her husband to return home from war, weaving and undoing a shroud daily to retain independence from would-be suitors. In Abed’s film, a woman methodically labours over the making of a garment using the bodies of hundreds of fish – creating a new and obscure reality, which is adorned and animated in something between dance and struggle, against a silent setting sun. 

In our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021), Abed ruminates on generational repetitions and routine in Al-Jib, a village six miles northwest of Jerusalem, whose locals trace choreographed vignettes of everyday rituals. As people peer and descend into caves and crevices, and engage in synchronous dance on textured Super 8, a vast and uniting depth of history is conjured through Maya Khaldi’s haunting vocal performance of various layered folk stories. Abed challenges dominant, linear and hierarchical forms of historical record, privileging a parallel perspective of loops and indigenous knowledge in which generations are bonded to the curves and lines of their place – a beating, breathing organism. 

In her new 16mm work, A Night We Held Between, Abed again finds power in myth, drawing a parallel between the confusing and confining inescapable structure of King Minos’s Labyrinth and the current reality in Palestine. Across valleys and passages, Abed conjures an abstract and dream-like physicality between the search for a utopian past and reclaiming an alternative future. Sound and gesture pour from the land, through song, drone and atmospheric audio, as Abed’s characters dance and defend, pushing against entrapment with visceral agility and generational knowing. 

You are invited to join the Alchemy team after this screening for a Nightcap in the Heart of Hawick café bar, featuring a special live set of koolshi wa kalashi, Luna Issa’s monthly Subcity Radio show blending funk, soul, hip hop and more from around the globe with a focus on Southwest Asia and North Africa.

PROGRAMME

A NIGHT WE HELD BETWEEN
Noor Abed
30’10 – Palestine – 2024