Film Screening & Discussion: LYD

About this event

Join us for the screening of LYD, “A story of a city that once connected Palestine to the world – what it once was, what it is now, and what it could have become.” This screening will be followed by a discussion with Sarah Shamash, Dana Qaddah, and Sobhi Al-Zobaidi, moderated by Adel Iskandar.

This feature-length, sci-fi documentary shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. From the perspective of the city herself, voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, the viewer is guided through the lifespan of a five-thousand-year-old city and its residents. Lyd was once a thriving Palestinian city with a rich history. In 636AD, It was even considered the first capital of Palestine. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Lyd became an Israeli city, and in the process, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred by Israeli forces, and most of the city’s 50,000 Palestinian residents were exiled. Today, the city has a Jewish Israeli majority and a Palestinian minority and is disinvested and divided by racism and violence. For Palestinians, Lyd’s story is a painful and tragic fall from grace, which is why our film dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?

Using never-before-seen archival footage of the Israeli soldiers who carried out the massacre and expulsion, the city explains that these events were so devastating that they fractured her reality, and now there are two Lyds –– one occupied and one free. As the film unfolds, documentary portions follow a chorus of characters through their daily lives, creating a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city, and vivid animations use the language of speculative fiction to envision an alternate reality where the same documentary characters live free from the trauma of the past and the violence of the present. As the film cuts between fantastical and documentary realities, it ultimately leaves the viewer questioning which future should prevail.

Speakers

Sarah Shamash is an Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University. Her PhD focuses on an archive of films in Brazil known as Vídeo nas aldeias. Her artworks comprise the use of media in a wide variety formats, such as installation, documentary, photography, sound, performance, and video. Her work has been shown in curated exhibitions and film festivals internationally and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Her work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema as a pluriversal art. She lives on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh First Nations in what is known as Vancouver.

Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator based between Turtle Island (Canada) and Lebanon. Qaddah practice uses archives of personal and itinerant cultural knowledge, contextualized by themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and the condition of abstracted from one’s own sense of self and place.

Sobhi Al-Zobaidi, independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar, has made a number of award winning documentaries, short fiction, art videos and multi-media installations, and since 1998, he has been an active member of the new and independent film movement in the occupied Palestine. Al-Zobaidi studied cinema at New York University and has taught film and media at Birzeit Universiy and Al-Quds University as well as published reviews in both English and Arabic of Palestinian cinema, art and politics.

[Moderator] Adel Iskandar is an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver/Burnaby, Canada. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several works including “Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution” (AUCP/OUP); “Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism” (Basic Books); “Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation” (University of California Press); “Mediating the Arab Uprisings” (Tadween Publishing); and “Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring” (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar’s work deals with media, identity and politics; and he has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His forthcoming publications are two monographs, one addressing the political role of memes and digital satire and the other about contemporary forms of imperial transculturalism. Iskandar’s engaged participatory research includes supporting knowledge production through scholarly digital publishing such as “Jadaliyya” and academic podcasting such as “Status.” His community research agenda involves showcasing local grassroots participatory creative production by communities in the Middle East to confront the rise of extremism. Iskandar’s work also involves the autobiographical documentation and self-representation of Syrian newcomer women in the Lower Mainland illustrates their ingenuity in the face adversity. Prior to his arrival at SFU, Iskandar taught at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.