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A landscape film still showing a large open doorway built into the side of a sandy hill in an arid terrain. From the dark opening in the hillside, figures emerge carrying a large red flag between them.
A landscape film still showing a large open doorway built into the side of a sandy hill in an arid terrain. From the dark opening in the hillside, figures emerge carrying a large red flag between them.

Still from ‘A Passage’ (2019) by Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Image courtesy of the artists.

Still from ‘Sebastia Disagreement’ (2023) by Yiru Qian. Image courtesy of the artist.

Online Screening: Screening Rights Film Festival – ‘One’s Connection is Another’s Division’

Online11–20 October 2024

From October 11–20, we will be hosting two films on the Grand Union homepage preceding and throughout this year’s Screening Rights Film Festival – DOUBLE BILL. We will be showing ‘Sebastia Disagreement’ (2023) by Yiru Qian and ‘A Passage’ (2019) by Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari for a screening entitled ‘One’s Connection is Another’s Division: Colonial Infrastructures in South Caucasus and Palestine’. This online screening deepens the festival’s engagement with the industrial heritage of the Midlands while also resonating with many other titles showing in the full festival.

This online screening is live until 20 October

In particular, it serves as a continuation of a screening on railroads and colonial infrastructures in South Caucasus and Iran, hosted at The Transport Museum in Coventry on 18 October. It also connects with two Palestinian-Ukrainian solidarity screenings, taking place at MAC Birmingham on 19 October, and an event focused on genocide, displacement, and family histories in Ethiopia and Armenia, also at MAC Birmingham, on 20 October

This pair of films is designed to give guests a glimpse of the broader programme and to convey the concept behind DOUBLE BILL through a concise and evocative experience lasting about half an hour.

 

About the Films

Sebastia Disagreement

Yiru Qian / 2023 / UK / 15 minutes / Arabic, English with written English 

Through highly inventive methods of physical and immaterial visualisation — digital 3D models and screen capture, as well as miniaturised re-enactments using hands, maps, gypsum models, and even puppetry, with marionette oranges serving as stand-ins for the legendary Jaffa fruit — filmmaker-researcher Yiru Quan unpacks the zionist occupation of Masudiya and Sebastia stations, once crucial sites for Palestinian agricultural activities and historically important transit points on the Hejaz railway, which connected cities across North Africa and the Middle East.

Yiru Qian is an architect and visual artist who currently lives and works in London. Influenced by her interests in architectural design, archival research, and the archaeology of knowledge, she explores historical narratives that traverse time and space through imagery, mapping, and making.

A Passage

Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari / 2019 / Armenia / 17 Minutes / Armenian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles 

Oil trucks with Farsi on them, a children’s choir singing in Armenian, an Armenian man singing about the now-discontinued Yerevan-Baku railway in Russian, and the haunting, enigmatic images of two horsemen with mirrors for faces, who search for wind as if to help a nowhere-to-be-seen plane take off and carry a ghostly image of a train through a derelict Soviet-era tunnel — the Meghri region in southern Armenia, which borders Azerbaijan, emerges as a territory in-between languages, cultures, temporalities, and, as discussed by radio hosts in Mandarin Chinese and Russian in the background, neoimperialist geopolitical interests in the South Caucasus and the Middle East.

Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies.

Screening Rights Film Festival (SRFF) is the West Midlands’ festival of socially engaged and formally innovative cinema from the Global South. Situated at the intersection of art, academia, and activism, the festival is primarily funded by the Warwick Institute of Engagement, with occasional support from Film Hub Midlands.

In line with this year’s subtitle and theme, DOUBLE BILL, SRFF 2024 is screening films from seemingly different and sometimes geographically distant contexts that, in fact, share much in common—such as struggles, traumas, and cultural similarities. Each screening will pair a feature with a short film or present a series of mid-length moving image works that are intended to complement, echo, and enhance one another. The festival is particularly interested in promoting South-to-South solidarity through mutual (un)learning between countries and populations in East and West Asia, Africa, and Latin America on the one hand, and those in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus on the other.

SRFF 2024: ‘DOUBLE BILL’ was researched, conceived, and facilitated by Misha Zakharov as part of his ongoing practice-based PhD project in Film & TV Studies at the University of Warwick. It was coordinated by Pablo Alvarez Murillo (Film & TV alumna at Warwick) and directed by Michele Aaron (Professor in Film & TV at Warwick). SRFF 2024 has been supported by the Warwick Institute of Engagement.

Screening Rights Film Festival is taking place at various venues in Birmingham and Coventry from the 17-20 of October, 2024.