PRISMATIC GROUND OPENING NIGHT 2024
*7PM May 8 at Museum of the Moving Image*
Co-presented by Bidoun and Screen Slate

Prismatic Ground kicks off its fourth edition with the @cinematekbe restoration of Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981), a visceral glimpse of everyday life in the occupied West Bank. A reading by poet Hala Alyan (@hala.n.alyan) will commence the evening, and researcher, writer, and curator @kimikku will appear to contextualize the film. An afterparty co-hosted by @djsagainstapartheid will follow at @h0l0 (Details TBA).

Fertile Memory (Michel Khleifi, 1981, 99 min.)
Restored DCP. In Arabic with English Subtitles.

The first feature length film to be shot in the West Bank, Fertile Memory is a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the dispossession that heavily determines their lives. Romia Farah—the director’s aunt—is a widowed grandmother working in an Israeli garment factory. Her tenacious personality fuels a decades-long legal battle to reclaim her expropriated land, as well as her strict adherence to patriarchal values. Sahar Khalifa is a feminist writer teaching at Birzeit University. She struggles with the double oppression of Israeli occupation and the gendered ostracization and loneliness she experiences after seeking divorce. Fertile Memory marks a distinct shift in Palestinian filmmaking, from a unified revolutionary cinema, to a capacious reflection of Palestinian society and its many individuals, contradictions, and temporalities. — Tiffany Malakooti, @bidounprojects

“It is Khleifi’s achievement to have embodied certain aspects of Palestinian women’s lives in film. He is careful to let the strengths of Farah and Sahar emerge slowly, even if at a pace that risks losing the film the larger audience it deserves. He deliberately disappoints the expectations engendered in us by the commercial film (plot, suspense, drama), in favor of a representational idiom more innovative and – because of its congruence with its anomalous and eccentric material – more authentic.” — Edward Said