Jumana Manna

BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors.

Robert Lachmann was a German-Jewish ethnomusicologist. In the 1930s, his radio show "Oriental Music" explored the musical traditions of Palestine and included regular live performances by musicians from different ethnic and religious groups. Inspired by Lachmann’s musicological studies, Palestinian artist Jumana Manna travels through Israel and the Palestinian territories of today with recordings from the programme. What do these songs sound like now when performed by Moroccan, Kurdish, or Yemenite Jews, by Samaritans, members of the urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians?

Foragers interweaves documentary and fiction to report on a searing conflict between the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and Palestinian foragers. Through an elaborate and elegant composition, the film successfully captures the inherited love, resilience and knowledge of these traditions, over an eminently political backdrop.

Deep in the earth beneath the Norwegian permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. For the first time ever, seeds held there from a major gene bank in Aleppo are now being replicated, after its holdings were left behind when the institution had to move to Lebanon due to the civil war. It is refugees from Syria who are carrying out this painstaking work in the fields of the Beqaa Valley. In the Levant, dry conditions and the power of global agricultural corporations are the biggest challenge, while in the Arctic Circle - where the seed vault was supposed to withstand anything - it is rising temperatures and melting glaciers.

Shot in Norway and Palestine, The Goodness Regime investigates the foundations of the ideology and the representation of a country adopting the most corporate gimmicks to brand itself as a peace-making nation. Deconstructing the arcanes of the Oslo Accords and unveiling the process of a national myth construction, the film looks at the political stages, the roles and the scenes through the very empirical spectrum of theatre, combining children's performances with archive sound recordings from diplomatic speeches.

Alfred Roch, member of the Palestinian National League, is a politician with a bohemian panache. In 1942, at the height of WWII, he throws what will turn out to be the last masquerade in Palestine. Inspired by an archival photograph, A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade) recreates an unconventional bon vivant aspect of Palestinian urban life before 1948. Posing silently for a group photo, the unmasked and melancholic pierrots accidentally personify the premonition of an uncertain future.

An exploration of the intimacy that arises between a swimming coach and athlete. In the film, I return to meet my coach five years after having quit competitive swimming and ask to recreate a recurring situation from my teenage years, in which he gives me a massage and I massage him in return.