The Culturist Film Club x Jameel Arts Centre on July 19: Rematerialising the Archive
The third Jameel’s Summer Cinema, in collaboration with The Culturist Film Club screening will focus on archives.
The two films selected for this programme will reflect on colonial and corporate archives and how they can both reveal and distort, illuminate and erase.
Programme 3: Rematerialising the Archive
Date: Saturday, July 19
Time: 7.30pm - 9.30pm
Venue: Lobby, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (location map)
Free to attend, but online registration is required.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (Theo Panagopoulos, 2024, UK, 17 min)
When a filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen film archive of silent colour films of Palestinian wildflowers made in the 1930s and 1940s by Scottish missionaries in British-occupied Palestine, he decides to reclaim the footage.
This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.
Scenes of Extraction (Sanaz Sohrabi, 2023, Canada, Iran, 43 min)
Between 1901 and 1951, the British controlled oil operations in Iran expanded their geological expeditions and geophysical methods for locating commercially viable oil reserves across its entire oil concession.
This essay film takes the viewer on an archival stroll into the British Petroleum Archives to unearth the still and moving images that documented this expansive colonial network of geological explorations that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil concessions in Papua and South East Asia.
It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “Reflection Seismography” method for oil exploration, and traces the technical and social entanglement between the infrastructures of oil and the camera during the operations of British Petroleum across the Iranian oil belt.
The screenings will be followed by a discussion between me and Jasmine Soliman. We recently started a project called Collected Histories and I’m looking forward to discussing these two films with her and the audience.
About Jasmine Soliman
An archivist and the founder of RepCinema and co-founder of Collected Histories. Her work focuses on documentation, memory, and digital accessibility—particularly through a neurodivergent lens. She is interested in vernacular photography, cinema history, and the archival traces of everyday life across the Mashriq and Maghreb. www.jasminesoliman.com