Closing evening of Films, Facts, and Fiction

Join us on Wednesday, June 27 at 7pm for the culminating evening in this season’s ArteEast series Films, Facts, and Fiction to be held at e-flux. The evening features a selection of short films by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, Ghassan Salhab and Mohamed Soueid, Monira al-Qadiri, and Ayman Nahle, and a music video coda by Meriem Bennani. Sampling an array of genres from science-fiction to the essay film, documentary détournement, and the music video, the five works, each in their own way, perform a subtle queering of place—political or intimate, made up or registered. Some are funny, and all are touching.

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, 2016
Video, 29 min.


In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain is a science-fiction meets fake-history film, presented as a disclosure of a therapy session between a narrative terrorist and her psychiatrist. Through a sampling of CGI images, live action, and archival material, the filmmakers explore the constructs of fact, fiction, history, and national identity. The film’s storyline revolves around a resistance cell that deposits porcelain underground in an effort to create a fictional civilization, as a way of staking out a real political claim to the right of the occupied to their (vanishing) land.

Larissa Sansour (b. 1973, East Jerusalem) is an artist living and working in London.

Søren Lind (b. 1970, Copenhagen) is an author of children’s books and literary fiction, working and living in London.

Ghassan Salhab and Mohamed Soueid, Aala Kad al Shawk, Le Voyage immobile (As Far As Yearning), 2017
Video, 23 min.

This heartwarming essay film plays out as a conversation between two filmmakers and long-time friends living in two different cities—Beirut and Dubai. In a back-and-forth exchange of moving images, monologues, and soundtracks, the film unfolds as a lyrical intimation of friendship, a fusion of feelings of longing and, eventually, of the filmmakers’ image- and sound-worlds. The film’s Arabic portion of the title is named after a song by mid-twentieth-century icon Abdel Halim Hafiz on yearning, a yearning that is at once alleviated and amplified by a voyage immobile, or “motionless journey.”

Ghassan Salhab (b. 1958, Dakar) is a screenwriter, filmmaker, and producer living and working in Beirut.

Mohamed Soueid (b. 1959, Beirut) is a writer, filmmaker, and producer living and working between Paris and Beirut.

Monira al-Qadiri, The Craft, 2017
Video, 16 min.

The Craft is Monira al-Qadiri’s most recent film, in which the artist delves into her family history. The film evokes something of childhood’s sympathetic magic, reveling in futuristic architecture, pop culture, dreams, junk food… Stories of alien abductions, geopolitical entanglements, and international diplomacy—as features of standard modernity—become destabilized through potent fictions-as-facts. With humor and suspense, the film builds up to the artist’s discovery that “the American century has finally ended.”

Monira al-Qadiri (b. 1983, Dakar) is an artist living and working in Berlin.

Ayman Nahle, Now: End of Season, 2017
Video, 20 min.

Now: End of Season is a documentary détournement on the state of the Syrian crisis. The film pictures the everyday entanglement of refugees, tourists, and passersby in the Turkish seaport town of Izmir, where a sense of limbo and standstill looms as illegalized migrants await departure to the unknown. The soundtrack to the film is from a phone call by Hafez al-Assad to Ronald Reagan made some thirty years earlier. A caller on hold, an impatient translator… In Nahle’s words, “more confused than ever, the world is on the edge, showing the disoriented face of a smiling disaster.”

Ayman Nahle (b. 1984, Beirut) is a filmmaker living and working in Beirut.

Meriem Bennani, Léviathan, 2017
Video, 16 min.

Léviathan is a music video commissioned by the Parisian electronic musician Flavien Berger as part of the release of his first album (and three-song EP) with the French label Pan European. Bennani directed a video with found and fabricated footage for the album’s 15-minute title track. Starring Mae Elvis, a performance artist known for taking on different identities in her work. The black and white cinematic video follows Elvis wandering through a suburban neighborhood, with dreams of dolphins and dancing women.

Meriem Bennani (b. 1988, Rabat) is an artist living and working in New York.

This program is part of ArteHub 2018, and is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.