Join us for an evening of film, conversation, and community as part of Jameel’s Summer Cinema, in collaboration with The Culturist Film Club. This programme brings together two experimental films that reflect on colonial and corporate archives; how they can both reveal and distort, illuminate and erase.

From Palestine and Iran to questions around land, labour and the camera’s role in extractive economies, these films explore how the visual record is shaped by ideology, and how artists today are re-reading the past to tell new stories.

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (Theo Panagopoulos, 2024, UK, 17 min)
When a filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen film archive of silent colour films of Palestinian wildflowers made in the 1930s and 1940s by Scottish missionaries in British-occupied Palestine, 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.

Scenes of Extraction (Sanaz Sohrabi, 2023, Canada/Iran, 43 min)
Between 1901 and 1951, the British controlled oil operations in Iran expanded their geological expeditions and geophysical methods for locating commercially viable oil reserves across its entire oil concession. This essay film takes the viewer on an archival stroll into the British Petroleum Archives to unearth the still and moving images that documented this expansive colonial network of geological explorations that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil concessions in Papua and South East Asia. It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “Reflection Seismography” method for oil exploration, and traces the technical and social entanglement between the infrastructures of oil and the camera during the operations of British Petroleum across the Iranian oil belt.

Following the screening, Hind Mezaina will be in conversation with archivist and researcher Jasmine Soliman. Audiences are encouraged to engage in collective viewing, stay for the discussion, and enjoy food and refreshments available throughout the evening.

Screenings are free to attend. Registration is required.
Curated by Hind Mezaina, founder of The Culturist Film Club.

Jasmine Soliman is an archivist and the founder of RepCinema and co-founder of Collected Histories. Her work focuses on documentation, memory, and digital accessibility—particularly through a neurodivergent lens. She is interested in vernacular photography, cinema history, and the archival traces of everyday life across the Mashriq and Maghreb.
www.jasminesoliman.com

Hind Mezaina is an artist, film curator and writer from Dubai. Her interests lie in cinema, cities, visual culture, collective memory and archives. As an artist she works primarily in analogue photography and lately with moving image. As a film curator, she has programmed screenings for local institutions including National Pavilion UAE, NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Sharjah Art Foundation, The Africa Institute, Alliance Française Dubai, and Jameel Arts Centre. In 2024, Mezaina was included in Screen International’s Future Leaders 2024: Film Festival Programmers and Curators to Watch.  In 2009 she founded The Culturist blog, and in 2022 she started The Culturist Film Club hosted at various venues across Dubai.
www.hindmezaina.com

Image: Still from Scenes of Extraction (Sanaz Sohrabi, 2023)