OPENING NIGHT PRESENTATION: Foragers + Blessed Blessed Oblivion

Name: OPENING NIGHT PRESENTATION: Foragers + Blessed Blessed Oblivion
Start: 2024-10-11T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Emagine Willow Creek

Schedule

Fri Oct 11 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Emagine Willow Creek | Plymouth, MN

Join us for our Opening Night Presentation of Jumana Manna's FORAGERS, at Emagine Willow Creek Theater. Sponsored by Mizna. 💜
All ticket sales to for this film, in-person and virtual, will be donated to The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund, which is dedicated to providing medical attention to the children of Gaza by transporting critically injured children, with their caretakers, from Palestine to Lebanon, where they can receive the best possible medical, psychological, and social care. 💌
Manna's short film BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION will play before the feature.
ABOUT THE FILMS:
FORAGERS depicts conflict between the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and Palestinian foragers around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace.
Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs.
Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law.
By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors.
Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising (1963)", the video uses visual collage and the musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects — leather-clad bikers, serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray, that of stereotyped male “thug” culture in Palestine.
Close-up fragments construct an eroticised and parodic montage of bodies, cars and places, intersected by snippets of dialogue and a monologue about the art of a car wash. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry and unashamed self-praise.