Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

VALENTIN NOUJAÏM – IN RELATION

September 22 – September 23

Valentin Noujaïm’s moving image practice slips between the formal seams of genre and method, the cracks of disappeared histories and communities, the hazy bifurcations of dystopic nightmares and utopic reveries, the scales of monumental narratives and intimate encounters. Born in France to Lebanese and Egyptian parents, the artist and filmmaker defies and dissembles reigning systems of power to explore how they act on bodies and psyches. His image-making investigates how colonization, gentrification and hierarchies of class, race, gender, and sexuality shape historical and contemporary narratives. Noujaïm embroiders his audiovisual experiments as an intergenerational witnessing, preoccupied with what is left behind and what is carried forward in the face of collapse.

“Valentin Noujaïm – In Relation” is a two-evening program of short films. Each takes a work by Noujaïm as an invitation to gather a constellation of co-conspirators, fellow travelers and kindred spirits.

Program 1, “Veiled Struggles: Queerness, Colonialism, and Memory”, begins with Noujaïm’s OCEANIA (2024) to guide a sequence of films negotiating the secrecies and exposures of queer life, the precarity and interdependence of familial bonds, and how to survive loss. Richard Fung’s SEA IN THE BLOOD (2000) and Mohammed Soueid’s CINEMA FOUAD (1994) carry the triptych across France, Trinidad, and Lebanon, carving out a political cartography warped by colonization and war. Through their generosity, the three films allow for the co-existence of grief, eroticism, and the flux of unsettled identities.

BEFORE SHE FORGETS HELIOPOLIS (2018) roots Program 2, “Re-tellings: What Our Grandmothers Have Known”. Noujaïm turns to his own family as a way into a story of exile and displacement that is at once specific and shared. Six companion films widen the geographic lens to Palestine, Senegal, Jamaica, the U.S., U.K. and Canada. In Program 2, grandmothers teach and tell, they pass down cultural traditions and Indigenous knowledges, they mark the multidirectional passage of time. Razan AlSalah, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Shenny De Los Ángeles & Amanda Morell (iiritu), Barbara Hammer, Darryl Daley, and Caroline Monnet each in their way honor the elders who are our living archives.

Guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who wrote the introduction above.

Program 1, on Tue, Sept 22, will be followed by a conversation with writer and curator Adam HajYahia and Yasmina Price.

Program 2, on Wed, Sept 23, will be followed by a conversation between Yasmina Price and writer, editor, and critic Jessica Lynne.

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