Residency for a filmmaker from Syria
June – December 2018

  • Residency for a filmmaker from Syria

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Arab Found for Arts and Culture are proud to announce Reem Al Ghazzi as a first fellow in a grant for a filmmaker from Syria sponsored by the City Council of Warsaw and the Arab Found for Arts and Culture and operated by the Museum of Modern art in Warsaw.

The mission of the project is to provide the institutional and creative framework for a resident filmmaker to progress in her/his project, as well as benefit from the museum’s network of affiliations with other institutions, archives and experts in order to accomplish her/his film project. 

Starting from June 2018 Reem Al Ghazzi will spend 7 months in Warsaw working along Polish experts and film professionals on post-production of her recent film “Iphigenia” (working title). The work on a project will embrace editing, translation/subtitling, sound adjustment, colouring and others as well as a series of merit based consultations under the supervision of outstanding Polish pedagogues and documentary film directors.

“Iphigenia” (Working Title) is a Feature Creative Documentary. The film follows the story of nine young Syrian women who fled to Germany; all of them escaping the war, some of them, also their own society. The young women, from different walks of life and various Syrian communities, are brought together on stage at the Volksbühne Theatre in Berlin for a role in a modern adaptation of Euripides’ “Iphigenia” by playwright Mohammad al-Attar and Syrian director Omar Abusaada. Reem Al Ghazzi gets intimate access to the cast of non-professional actors. She films the preparations, rehearsals, discussions and the premiere, but also the women’s lives in Germany outside the theatre. As the women spend more and more time together they discover that while they left to escape death and pain, they actually carry it within themselves wherever they go. Can they escape from the past, from family, society, and also themselves?

Reem al Ghazzi is a documentary filmmaker based in Damascus, Syria. She has produced numerous short documentaries as a solo filmmaker and as part of a collective. Her own films have received awards at the Casablanca International Film Festival and was winner of the Alexandria Film Festival Jury Award. Her films have also been screened at festivals such as Cinéma Du Réel and Locarno. Reem established a series of documentary workshops in Syria and has been running them across the country for almost 10 years. “Iphigenia” (working title) is her feature debut. The film is produced by Ramzy Haddad, Rosie Garthwaite.

The residency is operated by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw which since 2010 runs a series of film related projects. These are: Filmoteka – a project of digitisation and presentation on a purpose-built website  of outstanding films created by Polish visual artists in the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century; Film Award of 600 000 PLN, organised alongside the Polish Film Institute, for the production of a feature film by a visual artist. The Award aims to promote experimental, artistic cinema that radically breaks with conventional narrative solutions and established ways of constructing the film form; KinoMuzeum festival concentrates on the presentation of the most important phenomena in film from various distribution circuits. The festival is an attempt to go beyond the format of a single-themed cinephile’s film review that sets trends and focusses on feature-length films. Throughout the festival, film screenings are accompanied by lectures and meetings with directors and artists.

The project is supervised by Łukasz Ronduda (film curator) Magda Lipska (curator and researcher) and Katarzyna Karwańska (production supervisor). The external curator providing content-related support of the project is Rasha Salti – expert in Arab cinema.
 

See also:

Other archival events from that cycle:

DzieńGodzinaNazwa wydarzeniaMiejsce wydarzenia
18:30 Film screening „Iphigenia”Reem Al-Ghazzi's film screening MUSEUM on Pańska Street
Pańska 3 , Warsaw
20:00 Film screening „Stranger in Paradise”Guido Hendrikx's film screening MUSEUM on the Vistula
Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie 22 (Skwer Kpt. S. Skibniewskiego "Cubryny"), Warsaw
20:00 Film screening „The War Show”Andreas Dalsgaard's & Obaidah Zytoon's film screening MUSEUM on the Vistula
Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie 22 (Skwer Kpt. S. Skibniewskiego "Cubryny"), Warsaw
16:00 Film screening Screening of short films from the Syria Mobile Film Festival MUSEUM on Pańska Street
Pańska 3 , Warsaw
18:00 Film screening „My Escape”Feras Fayyad's film screening MUSEUM on Pańska Street
Pańska 3 , Warsaw
20:30 Film screening „Haunted”Liwaa Yazji's film screening MUSEUM on Pańska Street
Pańska 3 , Warsaw