Screening: Terror Tales und Mapping Lessons, Philip Rizk, March 5, Wolf Kino, Berlin

Film still from Terror Tales (Philip Rizk, 2024)

Film still from Mapping Lessons, (Philip Rizk, 2020)

On Wednesday, March 5, at 6:30 p.m., we will present an evening together with Wolf Kino (Berlin) as part of the HaFI project Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images. Following the screening of the essay films Terror Tales (2024) and Mapping Lessons (2020) by Philip Rizk – works that directly and painfully engage with the act of drawing, erasing, and redrawing lines on the map of the so-called “Middle East” –, the filmmaker will engage in a conversation with artist, filmmaker and researcher Marwa Arsanios.

The times and spaces of colonialisms and neocolonialism are connected in ways that demand forms and languages of analysis that cannot and must not be reduced to those of science and administration. Mapping Lessons and Terror Tales, two essay films by Philip Rizk from 2020 and 2024, consult and activate the audiovisual archives pertaining to the violence of the nation state and the counter-violence caused by it. They reassemble and recombine the visual, textual, and sonic documents of appropriation and dispossession, embarking on a quest for new traditions of resistance and old horizons of social possibility. Rizk sees his filmic work as preparation. Not in the sense of prepping, but of (self-)training with the images and sounds that are available but must be withdrawn from invisibilization.

Terror Tales (2024, 7’) reflects on the role of the image in creating narratives of terror that legitimize systematic regimes of racism—be it the American Dream or the ongoing Zionist annihilation of life in Palestine. (P.R.)

In the essay film Mapping Lessons (2020, 60’) we travel with K through time and space to a “Middle East” being colonized, where fences form borders of private property and national boundaries. The film then narrates struggles against this status quo and juxtaposes these with struggles elsewhere. 1960s Vietnam, national liberation in Angola as in Palestine, doing without state structures in the Syrian Revolution as in the Paris Commune, or undoing property in the early days of the Soviets and 1936 Spain. The film tries to mark ways of preparing for struggles to come. (P.R.)

Wed. March 5, 2025
6.30 p.m.
Wolf Kino
Weserstraße 59
12045 Berlin
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