NOVEMBER 19 - December 03, 2021
barbican cinemas | ica | curzon soho | soas
DOUBLE BILL
THE SILENT PROTEST: JERUSLAEM 1929 | NAILA AND THE UPRISING
TUESDAY 23 NOVEMBER | 18:30
ica: THE MALL, ST. JAMES'S, SW1Y 5AH
A double-bill focusing on two political movements lead by women in different eras of Palestinian history. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin tells us the story of a women's congress created to protest the British Mandate's anti-Arab bias in 1929 Jerusalem. Julia Bacha brings Naila Ayesh to the fore, the woman among those who mobilised the First Intifada of late 1980's.
The Silent Protest: Jerusalem 1929
Mahasen Nasser-Eldin | 2019 | 20'
In 1929, Palestinian women launched a movement drawing about 300 women to converged on Jerusalem from all over Palestine. Barred from protesting, they held a silent demonstration by way of a car convoy objecting the British High Commissioner’s bias against Arabs in the Buraq uprising. Their story is told by researcher and director Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, whose works focuses on the constructing of forgotten narratives of pre- and post-1948. Using found footage and archival material, Nasser-Eldin breathes new life into unseen images and remaps the urban trajectories of a 90-year-old story of defiance.
Naila and the Uprising
Julia Bacha | 2017 | 76’
When a nation-wide uprising breaks out in 1987, a woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a movement that forces the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination. Naila and the Uprising revolves around the tragic and remarkable story of Naila Ayesh, an active student organizer in Gaza in the 1980s. We follow her and the women's struggle through the end of the uprising and into negotiations with Israel, where Palestinians are recognized for the first time on the world stage. The women's movement bore immediate fruit, with female activists taking their place on the Palestinian delegation. But will the women be able to carry forward the vision of equality that their activism set in motion? Using evocative under-camera animation, intimate interviews, and exclusive archival footage, this film brings the courageous women who shook the Israeli occupation out of anonymity.