This season brings together artist films journeying through land, water, toxicity, ritual, and resistance by filmmakers from the Middle East and North Africa – featuring works by Inas Halabi, Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah, Marianne Fahmy, and Noor Abed, Jumana Emil Abboud, Ruba Salameh, Shada Safadi and Manal Mahamid.
The films in this season trace the memories held in bodies and landscapes alike. Poetry threads through silence, storytelling becomes a spell, and conjured worlds arise, alive with resistance and defiance. Moving through shifting geographies and gliding between past and future, each film is a vessel slipping between the seen and the sensed.
These films weave together fictional and nonfictional elements rooted in history, exploring the profound connections to the land and delicate ecosystems scarred by conflict and disaster. They lead us through layered worlds where magic, memory, resistance and ritual coalesce.
Programmed by Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms, London).
The series is part of the Moderna galerija’s new program Models of Coexistence.
SCREENING PROGRAM
Saturday, 7 June 2025, 18:00
Sunday, 24 August 2025, 19:30
War Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds
This film programme presents four powerful video works by Palestinian artists that explore occupation, displacement, memory, and resistance through personal and poetic visual narratives.
The programme is part of the multidisciplinary artistic project War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds, taking place between London and Beirut in 2024 and 2025.
Jumana Emil Abboud | Smuggling Lemons (2006, 20’18”)
Ruba Salameh | Yamm (Open Sea) (2016, 9’17”)
Shada Safadi | Wind Farm (2023, 2’57”)
Manal Mahamid | From Akka to Gaza (2024, 4′)
In Smuggling Lemons (2006, 20’18”), Jumana Emil Abboud repetitively records the social reality and exhausting procedure of crossing the checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Making several journeys through the checkpoints, she smuggles the fruits of an entire lemon tree from its garden in Jerusalem. By presenting the landscape and the monotony of the journey, the video records the way that repression works, and the lemons that the artist carries in her arms and on her body take on different connotations.
Yamm (Open Sea) (2016, 9’17”) is a video work that captures Ruba Salameh’s persistent return to a bus stop in Salah Al-din Street in East Jerusalem – where a huge billboard of the sea of Gaza overlooks the waiting passengers and passersby. The video captures the heart of everyday life in Jerusalem punctuated by the still Gazan sea, animated by film fragments from the beach at Tantoura, a Palestinian village demolished in 1948. Haunted by the notion of its very disappearance, the fading paper, its wear and tear, the marks of time and human intervention symbolically speak of erasure, separation, memory, impossibility and resistance.
Wind Farm (2023, 2’57”) is part of Shada Safadi’s ongoing research “Birds that no longer want to migrate.” The project sheds light on the practices of control imposed in the occupied Golan Heights, with new “isolation walls” being built under the guise of green energy. In 2019, an influential Israeli company proposed a plan to build a wind farm of 110 turbines along the ceasefire line, of which 32 occupy around 3,674 dunams (or 367.4 hectares) of Syrian farmers’ land in the villages of Majdal Shams, Masada, and Buqata. To date, 41 wind turbines have been installed. Located on the bird migration line across the Golan Heights, these turbines pose serious threats to the ecologies of humans and non-human species, including the fertile land, bats, bees and birds, such as the Golan eagle. Sound design by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh.
From Akka to Gaza (2024, 4’) by Manal Mahamid metaphorically portrays Palestinian resistance, depicting individuals as mythical creatures overcoming all terrestrial, maritime, and aerial barriers, as well as other borders imposed by Zionist colonialism. The film draws powerful parallels between the history of displacement and resilience, illustrating transformative journeys that challenge socio-political and physical obstacles.
War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is curated by Odessa Warren, Reem Shadid (Beirut Art Center), Siegrun Salmanian and Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms).
The programme War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is supported by Art Jameel and British Council through Anhar: Culture and Climate Platform.
Wednesday, 24 September 2025, 18:00
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah
And still, it remains, 2023, 28’
A powerful meditation on the afterlives of French nuclear tests in southern Algeria, And still, it remains offers a captivating and compelling picture of a community shaped but not circumscribed by its history. In Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains and summoning the landscape as a witness and protagonist, the directors Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah sensitively explore this forgotten history, which continues to live in the ecology and bodies of Mertoutek’s residents. Inverting the French narrative of technological triumph, the film returns to the site of the detonations to explore time, justice, decolonization, and resilience in the face of enduring toxic colonialism.
Directors’ statement:
And still, it remains is a film project sparked by reports in 2021 that radioactive dust caused by French nuclear bombs in the 1960s was traveling in the winds all the way from the Algerian desert to the French mainland. This odd weather pattern posed, for us, a poignant question about the environmental legacies of colonialism and whether they can be truly forgotten or contained.
In the small village of Mertoutek, we spent time with those who live surrounded by ancient rock art and the legacy of France's nuclear bombs. Exploring their migration to the area, faith, their way of life, colonialism and the nuclear bombs, the film asks what it means to live in such intimacy with toxic colonialism? What understanding is gained from this proximity? The feminist thinker bell hooks talks about a particular way of knowing that comes from experience – “it's a deep understanding that is often expressed through the body, as what they know has been deeply inscribed on it.” How do people make sense of what happened to them? What are their ideas of justice? And finally, how do they find a way to carry on?
Arwa Aburawa is an artist filmmaker based in London. Her work explores race and nature. She also runs a community film programme and film school as part of her work with ‘Other Cinemas’, a project she co-founded with Turab Shah, which aims to support and showcase the work of Black and non-white artists.
Turab Shah is a filmmaker and director of photography who holds an MA in Cinematography from Met Film School. Turab has a special interest in the legacies of colonialism and his films include ”Extradition’ which followed Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad’s battle against extradition to the US and ‘Zones of Non-Being’, a film which looks at Guantanamo through the lens of coloniality. He has produced a range of work from documentaries for AJE to moving image works for Humber Street Gallery, TfL/Art On The Underground, Brent Biennial ’22 as well as small independent fiction films.
Together with Arwa Aburawa, Turab co-founded ‘Other Cinemas’, which was recognised as a Film London Lodestar in 2022 and was awarded the ‘Support Structure for Support Structures’ fellowship by the Serpentine Gallery.
Inas Halabi
We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction, 2019, 11’57”
We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction explores the material effects of radiation, both physically and metaphorically. Following research conducted by a local nuclear physicist, Khalil Thabayneh, the film probes the possible burial of nuclear waste and the presence of manmade radiation in the Hebron District of Palestine. By placing red plastic filter sheets in front of the camera lens in various locations, different shades of red are generated that make visible the levels of radioactivity. In various ways, the delivery of this information is then thwarted, withheld, or delayed, and the film comes to turn on issues of representation and conveyance. The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, can be seen as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility – the systemic networks of power and control in the region – and the work becomes a meditation on how to account for the unfilmable but inexorable.
Inas Halabi (b. 1988, Palestine) works primarily with film to examine historical and political narratives of national identity, collective memory, and myth-making. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that overlooked or suppressed histories have on contemporary life. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2019. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Other Cinemas, UK (2025), Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje (2024), Palestine Amsterdam Film Festival (2024), Galway Film Fleadh (2024), Brookline Arts Centre (solo show 2024), Tavros (2024), Reel Palestine Film Festival (2024), Luleå Biennial (group show 2024), Toronto Palestine Film Festival (2023), Sharjah Film Platform (2023), Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2023), de Appel Amsterdam (solo show 2023), Beirut Art Centre (2023), Showroom London (solo show 2022), Europalia Festival, Brussels (2021), Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2021), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020), and Film at Lincoln Center, USA (2020). She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.
Wednesday, 29 October 2025, 18:00
Marianne Fahmy
Magic Carpet Land, 2020, 11’11”, HD Film, 2020
Inspired by the diaries of an Egyptian oceanographer from the 1930s, torn between his fascination with the west and his pride in his oriental background. He was part of a British scientific expedition, on board the first scientific research vessel in Egypt. The narrative is an imaginative exploration of what his thoughts were with regard to the collaboration with the English scientists and his evolving relationship with the sea. Throughout the journey, the oceanographer considers historical events and memories that reflect the social and political struggles of the time, raising questions of nationalism and identity.
The video addresses the conflict of identity, and envisions the dream of a nomadic land that the vessel resembles.
What things may come, 13 min, HD Film, 2019
A speculative film that imagines the aftermath of the floods that are predicted due to rising sea levels, submerging the Nile Delta in Egypt. Bouncing between myth and history, reality and fiction, the film deconstructs existing water projects and imagines a future where nationalism can be reinvented.
The film was funded by Mophradat.
Laws of Ruin, 2024, 14’, 4K Film, 2024
Laws of Ruins explores the history of water within a parafictional paradigm, positioning water cisterns as possible symbols for resistance and reformation. In the film, Fahmy layers a poetic voiceover over archival and original footage. The voiceover features excerpts from the memoirs of Arwa Saleh, a prominent female Egyptian activist in the radical student movement of the 1970s. The film considers the intersections between memory and ecology, positing demolished sites as sites of memory that can, through collective remembrance, gesture us towards alternative futures.
Marianne Fahmy (b. 1992) lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt. Her practice spans diverse mediums, including film and installation. Fahmy earned her BA degree in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Alexandria University, joining the MASS Alexandria Independent Art Program in 2016. Since then, her work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including MAXXI, Rome, Italy, Dak'Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal (2018), the 7th Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2020), Manifesta 13, Marseille, France (2020), Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2023), Bozar-Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2023), Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, Marseille (2023), Contemporary Arts Center, Ohio (2023) Art Basel Statement Section, Basel, Switzerland (2024), and the Art Explora Festival, Venice, Italy (2024) to name a few. Her films have been screened at the Kino der Kunst Film Festival (2017), Nurnberg Contemporary Art Museum (2017), and Sharjah Film Festival (2021), among others. In 2021, Fahmy was awarded the Prince Claus Fund Seed Award, and in recent years has received several grants to support her artistic practice.
