AISHEEN (Still Alive in Gaza)
A film by Nicolas Wadimoff
Producers: Joëlle Bertossa (Akka Films), Fayçal Hassairi (JCC)
Switzerland – Qatar 2010, 86 min
“Where is the ghost town?”, asks the little boy to the theme park attendant. “It’s there, right there. But it has been bombed… Do you want to see it?” It is with these words that the film, “Aisheen”, begins – an impressionist journey through a devastated Gaza after the war. And the ghost town? Gaza is the ghost town… Clowns that try to make children forget the bombing, armed with rubber balloons; a beached whale, “as big as a building” that feeds the fantasy; a scrawny, stuffed lion, bizarrely hanging in a cage at a zoo as if it were a trophy. A woman, at the side of the road, who has already been waiting for three weeks for a petrol delivery…
“Aisheen” (Still alive in Gaza) tells the story about the wait after the disaster. The wait for a better future inside the biggest prison in the world.
Through encounters in these otherwise ordinary places (but places that, here, take on another meaning), the film portrays a different Gaza. Poetic, surreal at times. “Aisheen” is a tribute to life…
Selected officially at the 2010 Berlin Festival, it received the Ecumenical Jury Award, then the Prize “Buyens-Chagoll” and the Special Mention of the Jury of Young Audiences at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon in April 2010, as well as being shown at International Film festivals in Toronto, Teheran, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen and Montreal.
Thursday 3rd February 2011, 7pm.
Tickets £7/£5 concessions
RSVP info@mosaicrooms.org, 020 7370 9990