Local organizations like CineSpeak and BlackStar and national organizations like Color Congress participated and sponsored:
NO EVIL EYE CINEMA Presents: Cinematic Interventions to Freeing Palestine and the Global South Symposium is aimed at decolonizing film in real time and curating a virtual environment with dedicated cinephiles that indict the cinematic status quo and build towards a radical future.
To FREE PALESTINE is to FREE CONGO, FREE SUDAN, FREE TIGRAY, FREE HAWAII, FREE PUERTO RICO & all oppressed & occupied peoples everywhere.
RECORDING OF THE SYMPOSIUM
SYMPOSIUM STATEMENT
We are currently witnessing a centennial-long campaign of empirical visual violence that has dehumanized a people to a degree where livestreaming an ethnic cleansing has been rendered acceptable. The process of detangling our current moment means confronting the multiplicity of cinema’s legacies ––– the camera as a tool of empirical propaganda and a tool of emancipation.
We understand the preciousness of operating behind the lens and the precarity of what our gaze can do to a people but what is our role and responsibility in this moment as film workers?
We must interrogate how the moving image has assisted in the proliferation of Orientalism and Islamophobia and has legitimized the horrors we currently see unfolding in Gaza where pro-Palestinian rallying cries can render an artist blacklisted.
We must learn the historical practices of colonial powers’ efforts in rendering cultural art production obsolete from oppressed artists & filmmakers whose efforts are to render their realities, culture, and history through visual modes of expression, understanding and legacy.
From this, we can begin to map our roles as carvers & preservationists of our product: the image, a film, a story that is rooted in an individual and collective reality of our conditions and our future.
As film workers and visual media practitioners, we must ask ourselves how we allow our tool to produce, project, and promote prejudice without our united dissent? As film workers, what are our collective demands and solutions moving forward?
Ruun Nuur and Ingrid Raphaël, NO EVIL EYE CINEMA Co-Founders & Symposium Curators
PETITION FUNDERS FOR A CEASEFIRE NOW
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JEWISH VOICES FOR PEACE
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Statement from SIFT’s Fiscal Sponsor INDEPENDENT PUBLIC MEDIA FOUNDATION