TIFF Lightbox 350 King St W, Toronto, Cinema 2

Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal

14 minutes
Firas Shehade
Short Experimental
2023
Austria

SCREENING WITH: A Fidai Film

English

In RPGs (role-playing game), one could say that real life can be rehearsed in a superstitious manner, with supernatural beings and worlds. Since the emergence of computer processing power and video games, the third world was a source for worldbuilding and space to apply game operations. Those games are not isolated from the socio-cultural and political environment that they are developed in. On the other hand, third-world gamers, developers, streamers, and hackers managed to modify those games and apply their own hyperreality in order to rehearse their world. This project explores how Palestinian players, GTA mods, and servers are simulating real life under colonial rule. Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal examines Los Santos as a corollary to Palestine.

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Lightbox 350 King St W, Toronto, Cinema 2

A Fidai Film

78 minutes
Kamal Aljafari
Experimental
2024
Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brazil, France

SCREENING WITH: Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal

English

Reel B75-92 shows scenes of orange-picking in Qalandia in 1957, which, according to the Hebrew description, are images of “terrorists”… They come from a collection of films and photos that were kept at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut, until it was looted by the Israeli army during the invasion of Southern Lebanon in 1982, and transferred to the archives of the Hebrew state's army and Ministry of Defense. It was only in the 2010s that academic circles - in Tel Aviv, in particular - began to question the aims of this systematic plundering of the entire Palestinian visual memory, which became war booty in part renamed for ideological reasons: the occupying power de facto ensuring control of the captured material. In A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari(An Unusual Summer, VdR 2020) turns this primordial plundering against those who perpetrated it. By revitalizing these lost images through his vibrant editing process, he unleashes the subversive power of a counter-narrative that has been erased over the decades, portraying life in Palestine before and after 1948 - particularly during the British mandate of the 1920s-1930s, when the tangible signs of future spoliation, humiliation and violence were already apparent. The Palestinian filmmaker thus meditates with a unique space-time depth of field on the fate of images produced by a people doubly dispossessed, both of its land, and of its history.

Awards
Jury Prize in the Burning Lights Competition Visions du Réel
GNCR/CINÉ+ Distribution Support Prize / Renaud Victor Prize FID Marseille
Premio del Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani (SNCCI) / Menzione d’onore Giuria Giovani Pesaro Film Festival

Learn More: A Fidai Film

Co-Presented by:

Art Metropole

Re:assemblage

Gallery TPW

Pleasure Dome

Regards palestiniens 

Images Festival

In-person: 5:00 PM at The Gallery, main floor of Lightbox, 350 King St. W. Toronto

TPFF Presents the Toronto Launch of Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha 

Join us for a poetry reading, discussion, and musical interpretation of Khalaf Tuffaha's poetry by musician Roula Said.

Book description: It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that.

Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed.

This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities.

In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first.—Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World.

Lena will be signing her books after her talk. Order your book in advance via the registration at a discount $21 (tax included); or pick it up at the TIFF shop for $23.10 (plus tax). 

About Lena Khalaf Tuffaha Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen), which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press) finalist for the Firecracker Award, and Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner; and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye and the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. She is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders entitled Against Silence.

Learn More about Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Copresented by: Another Story Bookshop, Writers Against the War on Gaza - TO, Poetry for Palestine Toronto and Hearing Palestine Initiative U of T