Abderrahmane has been living in the Alps in northern Italy for six months in a former family-run hotel converted into a temporary reception center for asylum seekers. In the room opposite his, lives Laly. Abderrahmane is waiting to appear before a commission that will rule on his asylum application. He has been warned: in view of this trial, he will have to tell his detailed story. Laly has appeared before the commission twice, soon he will have the response from Italy, from Europe. “In the name of the Italian people,” he will have to leave. Laly does not know yet, but soon there will be the Italian-French border and its giant mountains from which one sometimes hears a shrill cry: an elegy, which crosses the dislocated territories of migration, those that separate the south from the north, the sky from the earth. And in this story of the eye that is so human, appears in the background, the tragedy of the original soil, that of the Pangea or separation.

6 November 2024, 15:00
Kino Arsenal, Potsdamer Str. 2, 10785 Berlin

Ali Hussein AlAdawy is a curator, researcher, editor, writer, and critic of moving images and cultural history. He curated a number of film programs and seminars, working particularly on urban space and images of labor. He was one of the founders of Tripod, an online magazine for film and moving image critique (2015–2017), and was part of the editorial team of TarAlbahr, an online platform and publication for urban and art practices in Alexandria (2015–2018). He has completed an MA at the intersection of human rights and contemporary art at Bard College, New York.

Territories of Paranational Cinema is a cooperation between Kulturwissenschaftliche Filmforschung at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the SNSF-funded research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich. The program has been organized by Brigitta Kuster (HU) and Philip Widmann (UZH) and is supported by a strategic partnership grant from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.