MAR 12 • cine-club : Food, Land, Power

In tune with winter, this season’s film program, Rooted / Unrooted, explores the ties between people and their roots—meditating on memory, belonging to the land, and the forces at play trying to tear us away from them. Food, Land, Power is a program of three short movies, which triangulates an impossible dinner floating in space between Lebanese and Palestinian friends, the weaponization of food by the US, and the relentless fight to preserve local flora and agricultural knowledge in Palestine. These shorts help us imagine a borderless horizon, reflect on imperial power dynamics from the top down, and how people…

In tune with winter, this season’s film program, Rooted / Unrooted, explores the ties between people and their roots—meditating on memory, belonging to the land, and the forces at play trying to tear us away from them.

Food, Land, Power is a program of three short movies, which triangulates an impossible dinner floating in space between Lebanese and Palestinian friends, the weaponization of food by the US, and the relentless fight to preserve local flora and agricultural knowledge in Palestine. These shorts help us imagine a borderless horizon, reflect on imperial power dynamics from the top down, and how people resist them from the ground up. The program will be followed by a Q&A with director Youmna Chlala

The shorts
Trespass the Salt (2012, 11') dir. Youmna Chlala and Larissa Sansour
Arabic with English subtitles.
Through an intimate and fictionalized dinner, an impossible happening becomes real. The film explores cultural similarities and fabrications in a non-mediated moment outside the Western gaze - even if the space it seeks is invariably conditioned by it. This work was originally conceived as a 3-channel video installation.

Zap!! The Weapon Is Food (1976, 25') dir. Richard Marquand
An investigation of the US policy that makes food more powerful than oil.
“‘For agreeing to détente, Russia got American food. For signing a Middle East peace agreement, Egypt got American food. For prolonging the war in Vietnam, the generals of Saigon got American food, which they sold to buy arms.”
In the first of his 1976 Pilger series, a trilogy of documentaries made in the United States, Australian journalist John Pilger reveals American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy of refusing aid to countries that do not support his government in the United Nations and the existence of a “Zap Office” – officially, the Office of Multilateral Diplomacy – specially set up in the State Department to monitor voting patterns.
The revelations in Zap!! The Weapon Is Food were considered so controversial that the UK Independent Broadcasting Authority demanded that a “disclaimer” stating John Pilger was “expressing a personal view” be attached to this film and the rest of the Pilger series.

The Seed Queen of Palestine (2018, 25') (about Vivien Sansour) dir. Mariam Shahin
In the fields and terraces of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian woman is leading a quiet revolution.
Vivien Sansour is distributing rare, ancient heirloom seeds to Palestinian farmers. She wants to reintroduce long-forgotten Palestinian produce to the tables of people across the West Bank and beyond. Organic, climate change-resistant seeds are the key to that perpetuation.
She experiments with growing the treasured seeds in her own garden beside the separation wall, under the surveilling eye of Israeli soldiers.
But can she persuade farmers struggling with the pressures imposed by the Israeli occupation and agri-business to embrace such traditional crop-growing methods?
To convince them of the value of the seeds, she sets up a traveling kitchen, taking her seeds and their produce on the road and reminding Palestinians of the power of food.

The first screening was on Feb 26, a feature-length movie, Our Heedless Wars (1995, 52’), in which director Randa Chahal Sabbagh offers a deeply personal reflection on returning to her home country, Lebanon, amidst the ruthlessness of the Civil Wars (1975-1990). A juxtaposition of raw 16mm footage of the wars with intimate video diaries of her family, the film attempts to make sense of Lebanon and the filmmaker’s deep roots within it.

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Programmed by Nour Chahal Sabbagh and Nour El Helou.