And Today

And Today: Short Film Programme

The title of this three-film program, “And Today,” is the final line of Lebanese director Ghassan Salhab’s film “Untitled.” These two words encapsulate decades of destruction and mourning, the end of which is hard to imagine. Salhabo methodically documents the streets of South Beirut, devastated by Israel. He drives slowly, observing the ruined houses, passing people, blending into the city’s bustle, listening to animals howling in the night—he bears witness and shows. Palestinian director Shayma’ Awawdeh resists forgetting and, in her film “intersecting memory”, draws on archival footage shot in 2000 to reconstruct her childhood memories of the Second Intifada and life in occupied Hebron. The footage, shot more than two decades ago, is shocking not only for the violence it captures but also for its resemblance to what we see in the media today. “The Occupation of the Inner Life,” a film by Rosalind Nashashibi, a Palestinian artist born in exile, engages the imagination and begins with a question about the future. A young woman asks a fortune-teller, using Tarot cards, when she will fall in love. The answer: wait patiently until her world expands. What does it mean to live in anticipation while watching destruction from afar? In this program, time is cyclical: experiences of violence and displacement are passed down from generation to generation. Yet along with them come hope and resistance through memory, storytelling, and testimony. The program, which concludes with a question about the future, brings us back to the urgency of the present: this continues even today.

no title

A car makes its way from Beirut’s southern districts to southern Lebanon, crossing a landscape devastated by war. Ghassan Salhab’s camera captures ruined buildings, roads and neighbourhoods, along with other traces of war, allowing the destruction to speak for itself. The forty-minute journey becomes an unbroken gaze on places devastated by Israel’s war, where the ruins bear witness to a history being written here and now.

Ghassan Salhab is a Lebanese director and screenwriter whose work explores Beirut’s urban spaces and the lasting effects of war on the city’s landscape and collective identity. He began his career with Phantom Beirut (1998). His second film, Terra Incognita (2002), was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. Salhab teaches film in Lebanon.

Intersecting memory

When Shayma’ Awawdeh was six, the Second Intifada – a Palestinian uprising that lasted from 2000 to 2005 – began. More than twenty years later, she revisits old videotapes and memories of her childhood: her school uniform, her birthday cake, and her family home in Hebron, then occupied by Israeli soldiers. Personal memories intertwine with images of the city: tanks in the streets, checkpoints, homes being demolished, and the wounded and dead. Her childhood experiences merge with Palestinian collective memory and the history of the occupation.

Shayma’ Awawdeh is a Palestinian filmmaker born in 1994. A graduate of Dar Al-Kalima University, where she studied film directing, she has directed three short films: 4th Floor (2018), This Home Is Ours (2024), and Intersecting Memory. She has also worked as a director of photography and camera assistant on several short films, and led filmmaking workshops for children.

Occupation of the Inner Life

The film explores the occupation of Palestine through artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s family history, daily life and experience of exile. Personal images intertwine with Palestinian history and contemporary life. Nashashibi’s gaze turns to her loved ones, domestic spaces, bodies and painting. The film shows how history and political realities become inscribed in ordinary people’s daily lives and relationships, coming to occupy every aspect of their existence.

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based painter and filmmaker of Palestinian and Northern Irish heritage. Shot on 16mm, her films have a tactile, handmade quality and convey a sense of intimacy, creative process and shared experience. Palestine is a recurring subject in both her films and paintings. In her paintings, she uses familiar signs and art-historical references to make them strange and invite us to look at them anew.