This online event takes place on Saturday 27 March, 5pm GMT.

Join filmmaker Kamal Aljafari and critic Kareem Estefan for a discussion about Aljafari’s newest film, An Unusual Summer (2020). The film is available to watch online, co-presented by Mizna and The Mosaic Rooms between 25 and 28 March 2021.

Drawing on footage from a surveillance camera installed by his father following an act of vandalism on the street outside his home, An Unusual Summer  captures fleeting moments of poetry of everyday life in the family and the neighbourhood while in the background, the daily choreography of El Ramle under Israeli occupation comes to the surface.

The film depicts and critiques with the impacts and meaning of surveillance technologies––those we know about, those we only think we know about, and those we willingly participate in every time we pick up our devices. Acknowledging the realities of corporate and governmental forms of surveillance, violence, and control, the film also explores the banality of the modern surveillance state and our complicity within it.

As part of the film and discussion event, artist and writer Lamia Abukhadra composed a critical essay on An Unusual Summer. Read here.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

This event is part of the public programme for Heba Y. Amin’s exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes. The exhibition is curated by Anthony Downey.

This is also the debut event of Mizna’s spring film series on Surveillance. It continues April 28–May 2 with Al Asleyeen (2017) by Marwan Hamed and May 26–30 with Empty Metal by Bayley Sweitzer and Adam Khalil.

Image: Kamal Aljafari, An Unusual Summer, 2020. Still. Courtesy of the filmmaker.