In Vitro + A Magical Substance Flows Into Me

‘The Ground Is Not Unchanging' is a curated series of screenings and workshops bookending Mina Heydari-Waite’s solo exhibition for Glasgow International Festival 2024. Throughout May, Heydari-Waite has programmed a season of screenings of works that resonate with her current research into alternative archival practices seeking pluralised and liberatory understandings of the world we share. We can not think about liberation without thinking about Palestine. We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine and anti-colonial struggles across the globe.

In Vitro

Larrissa Sansour

2019

28’

Arabic with English subtitles

A Palestinian sci-fi set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the disaster, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.

In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s founder, 70-year-old Dunia, is on her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia, Dunia’s successor, visits her. Alia was born underground and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia.

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me

Jumana Manna

2016

66’

Arabic, English, Hebrew with English subtitles

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me weaves through musical traditions of various communities living in and around occupied Palestine. Manna took as her starting point German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s field recordings of ‘Oriental’ groups in Palestine in the 1930s and his Oriental Music radio series made for the Palestinian Broadcasting Service (1920-1948). In the film we follow the artist as she revisits the communities that Lachmann studied – including Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians. Over the course of her travels she visits homes, offices, recording studios, and places of worship, replaying Lachmann’s recordings and making new recordings of her own. Interspersed with these are scenes from her own family home in East Jerusalem.In a metaphorical excavation of an endlessly contested history, the film’s preoccupations include: the complexities embedded in language, as well as desire and the aural set against the notion of impossibility.

19:00 - doors

19:30 - In Vitro

20:00 - A Magical Substance Flows Into Me

21:05 - event ends

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OFFLINE, formerly (Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios) is a charitable organisation committed to supporting experimental arts and community-focused film programming in Govanhill.

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Pay what you can: £0-£12

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All titles will be shown with closed captions.

The OFFLINE Cinema has step free access but toilets are not accessible. We apologise for this and assure you that we are working on making the building a more welcoming space. In the meantime, The Bungo on Nithsdale Rd have granted our audience access to their accessible toilets.

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Certification:

Both In Vitro and A Magical Substance Flows Into Me have no certification, 12A advised

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Image 1 description: black and white film still from In Vitro, the younger character, dressed in a futuristic black overall, gazes with a concerned look into the eyes of the older character, dressed in white, on her deathbed, they look strikingly alike.

Image 2 description: hands lay out archival photographs on a soft green background, there is a music sheet to the lift of the image.

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Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Glasgow International Festival.

Host or Publisher GAMIS