Jocelyne Saab, Jumana Emil Abboud, Kamal Aljafari, Mohammad Malas
The Dream
18:00
2019. In the grey corridors of an administrative office in Berlin, exiles daydream as they wait for their turn to be called. 1976. Child survivors of the Karantina massacre, refugees in their own country, play at war. 1980. Displaced Palestinians in Lebanon dream of their lands by night. Somewhere, a woman tells a tale a thousand years old, of a half-child born from a half-eaten pomegranate.
Join us for a screening of films by Jocelyne Saab, Jumana Emil Abboud, Kamal Aljafari, and Mohammad Malas, carrying us through millennia of vivid and insistent dreams of freedom, reunion, and a nourishing land, set against the deadly dreams of oppressors.
After the screening, Sanabel Abdel Rahman joins online for a conversation on magic realism in cinema and literature. She is a researcher, literary critic, and assistant professor. Her work engages folk tales, magical realism, Indigenous climate fiction, and speculative writing, and explores liberatory imaginations, (re)connection with the land, decolonial writing, and the activation of alternative realities. She is the author of the forthcoming book Magical Realism in Palestinian Literature and Folk Tales: Reading the Distorted Spaces of the Nakba (2027) and of Māʼ Ward (2026), a work of Arabic autofiction and analogue photography.
This event is dreamt by Jade Meili Barget, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, and Sanabel Abdel Rahman to fundraise for a Gazan refugee family of six living in Berlin. All proceeds will go to helping the family pay rent for their temporary housing. Conceived in gratitude for Bergen Kunsthall’s support.
FILMS
Children of War, 1976, dir. Jocelyne Saab, 10 min
The Dream, 1987, dir. Mohammad Malas, 44 min 48 sec
I Feel Nothing, 2012, dir. Jumana Emil Abboud, 8 min 6 sec
It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus, 2019, dir. Kamal Aljafari, 16 min 17 sec
I Feel Everything, 2022, dir. Jumana Emil Abboud, 9 min
Screens is supported by Kulturrådet.
