Virtual dialogue with director Diana Allan 10/10
PARTITION
(2025, Palestine, Lebanon, Canada, 61 min.) Dir. Diana Allan
Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, tracing lines of continuity left by seismic displacement. Silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told, and ways of colonial seeing that seep into the present—Partition uses dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to examine both. Recovering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, unraveling colonial pasts through soundscapes of the precarious present, the film is a meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget.
THE FLOWERS STAND, SILENTLY WITNESSING
(2024, UK, 17 min.) Dir. Theo Panagopoulos
When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.