Film: A Magical Substance Flows Into Me
by Jumana Manna
Palestine/Germany/UK 2015
Documentary, 68 min
Discussants:
Refqa Abu-Remaileh (EUME Fellow)
& Jumana Manna
This event is part of the Arabic film series “Beyond Spring”, organized by Mayadin Al-Tahrir e.V., EUME and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.
Synopsis:
The film opens with a crackly voice recording. The voice is that of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film, Jumana Manna—herself a Palestinian from Jerusalem—follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine.
Jumana Manna is a Palestinian artist working with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focussing on the body and materiality in relation to nationalism and histories of place. She received a BFA from the Oslo National Academy of Arts, a MA in Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute of the Arts and the A.M. Qattan Foundation Young Palestinian Artists' Award. She has participated in various international exhibitions, biennales and film festivals.
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is an affiliated postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien’s “Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe” (EUME) programme. Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature and film.