Common Ground

The five films included in our COMMON GROUND programme explore the relationship between territory, image, identity, and memory, starting from a critical analysis of modern colonial and extractivist practices. What are the power dynamics that have shaped landscapes whose apparent idyllism captivates our gaze and imagination, and how do they reflect on the lives and histories of the communities that have inhabited them over the centuries? How does a territory, a language, a people, or an entire history disappear, and how can these absences be recovered in order to build a sustainable future on common ground? THE FLOWERS STAND SILENTLY WITNESSING re-signifies colonial images of flora indigenous to Palestine, exposing the symbolic violence of an imperialist gaze and the trauma of dispossession, while L’MINA builds a model of a mining town in Morocco in order to replicate the exploitative dynamics to which both the community and the natural territory are being subjected. COMMON PEAR throws us into a world ravaged by the climate crisis, speculating on our emotional and visceral connection to the earth, to its fruits, to the seasons, and reminding us that in the rush of the present we are very close to losing our future. Formally inventive and deeply sensory, PORTALS is an exercise in re-semantizing the territory around the Guadalete River in Cádiz, Spain, using analog cinematographic techniques and animated interventions to create imaginary flora and fauna, thus opening portals to alternative histories and geographies. Using a similar aesthetic, MEMORY IS AN ANIMAL, IT BARKS WITH MANY MOUTHS sets out in search of forgotten histories and endangered languages through spaces charged with ancestral energies, offering a playful reflection on the division between nature and culture. (Oana Ghera)

L’Mina

Randa Maroufi | Duration 16'

Jerada is a mining town in Morocco where coal extraction, although officially halted in 2001, continues informally to this day. L’MINA recreates the current work in informal mining pits using a set design created in collaboration with the town’s residents, who perform in their own roles.

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths

Eva Giolo | Duration 24'

In the valleys surrounding the Dolomite Mountains, children reimagine ancient Ladin legends while they examine bodies of water, holes, caves and passages looking for something lost or forgotten. Through a poetic choreography, the film becomes a fictional journey creating resonances between the landscape, magical thinking and Ladin – the protected old Rhaeto-Romanic language of the valleys; a puzzle unfolds as a timeless fable.

Portals

Elena Duque | Duration 16'

PORTALS follows the course of the Guadalete River in Cádiz, Spain, from the mountains to the sea: a catalog of landscapes that hide other landscapes, a collection of interdimensional portals (and postcards) that fuses real action and animation creating an impossible fauna and flora, inventing a new history and geography for a humble waterway.

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

Theo Panagopoulos | Duration 17'

When a filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers, 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.

Common Pear

Gregor Božič | Duration 15'

In a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate crisis, a team of scientists analyse the archival footage of farmers from the past, in an attempt to understand their connection to the land.