Take 1/ Take 2: Yesterday and Today in the Middle East

Iniva presents two evenings of film and debate with key cultural voices exploring recent events in the Middle East. These screenings and talks will combine works made prior to the current uprisings, with fresh perspectives from artists who are responding to new contexts.

Film screenings will be followed by a panel discussion engaging with debates around sexuality in middle eastern cultures, as explored through fictional rather than documentary narratives. Films include:

Les Illuminees (The Enlightened), Halida Boughriet, 2007
In this film the viewer’s focus, the screen itself, is fused with that of a woman wearing a burqa, the video artist herself. The viewer sees the world – the astounded passersby she encounters on a moving spavement inside the Montparnasse train station in Paris – through her eyes, her obstructed vision. The video offers a radical experience of otherness and isolation and demonstrates that apart from being symbolic, the covering of women is first of and foremost of a material nature

Wet Tiles, Lamya Gargash, 2003
Courtesy the artist and The Third Line
Concerned with the relics of an ever self-renewing architecture, Lamya Gargash documents the forgotten spaces in public and private realms in Emirati society. Gargash received first prize in the Emirates Film Festival, as well as Ibdaa Special Jury Award for this film.

The 5th Pound Film, Ahmed Khaled
Shunned by Egyptian officialdom, The Fifth Pound has invariably roused controversy because it irritates prevailing conservative sensibilities in its native country. While four pounds will buy two tickets for a bus ride for a young couple, the fifth pound is the wage the young man is intimidated into paying to buy the silence of the bus driver informally entrusted with policing sexual desire. A very smart anecdote borrowed from the everyday experience of young men and women in Egypt. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Red Chewing Gum, Akram Zaatari, 2000, 10 minutes
This erotic short is a love poem of sorts as one man recalls meeting another in an alley fifteen years earlier. There, alone in the alley together, they avidly watch a young street vendor chew his gum

Face A/Face B, Rabih Mroué, 2003, 10 minutes
A metaphysical film exploring the nature of memory and knowledge, sight and sound, physical evidence and identity, and recollection and survival.

Speakers: This film programme is curated by Jamoula Mckean who will participate in a discussion with writer and director Mahdi Fleifel after the screening.

Shubbak (Arabic for ‘window’) is the Mayor of London’s first festival of contemporary Arab culture, with over seventy events in more than 30 venues throughout the city from 4 – 24 July 2011. The festival offers a wide-ranging programme of visual arts, film, music, theatre, dance, literature, architecture, lectures and discussion.

Book your place at this event

Alternatively you can contact our bookings team: bookings@rivingtonplace.org / 0207 749 1240