Mohanad Yaqubi

R21 aka Restoring Solidarity by the Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi is an audiovisual essay that incorporates elements of documentary, fiction, and archive. It’s a supplement to, a montage of, and a reflection on a collection of twenty 16 mm films kept in Tokyo by the Japanese leftist solidarity movement with Palestine.

What struggles against inequality did the Palestinians and the Japanese share? R21 aka Restoring Solidarity testifies to solidarity throughout a history of political resistance: we see footage of demonstrations against a renewal of defense agreements between the US and Japan, footage of a training camp for Palestinian guerrillas, footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Fragments of a letter supposedly written by a Japanese activist reveal a fictional narrative framework: what story does the film archive from Tokyo tell?

Yaqubi is cofounder of the collective Subversive Film (whose work is also on view during C0N10UR), which focuses on researching and producing militant cinema.

Regular screenings: 30.09 / 01.10 / 04-07.10 at 14h (access with C0N10UR-pass) with Dutch subtitles.
Première on 23.09 at 17h with English subtitles.

(2022, 71’, Arabic, English and Japanese spoken)