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“For Cultural Purposes Only” Sarah Wood The film and talk will start at 2.15pm
As part of this day of celebration of Palestinian culture and society, Sarah Wood will introduce her film, “For Cultural Purposes Only”, together with some of the surviving film fragments that have inspired her work on lost Palestinian cinema.
In an age dominated by the moving image what would it feel like to never see an image of the place that you came from?
The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian people. It was lost in the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. Here interviewees describe from memory key moments from the history of Palestinian cinema. These scenes are drawn and animated. Where film survives, the artist’s impressions are corroborated. This is a film about reconstruction and the idea that cinema is an expression of cultural identity – that cinema fuels memory.
There is no charge for the film show and talk but donations to support the Palestinian people are always welcome.
Sarah Wood
Sarah Wood has been working for the last ten years as a curator and artist filmmaker. Her latest film projects have all been an exploration into ideas of the archive using found footage. Her films include Living Space (2003), Manifesto for Love (2003), Surrender! (2005) and I Want To Be A Secretary (2006), which won best film at the Halloween Film Festival in the same year. She more recently completed three found footage commissions, Gallery (2008) for Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Art Plus Party, The Angel of History (2008) for Branchage Film Festival with Jersey Film Archives, and The Book of Love (2009) for London Short Film Festival’s Soundtracks Project. Her most recent film, For Cultural Purposes Only (2009), an Animate Projects commission for Channel 4 about the lost Palestinian Film Archive, was shortlisted for a VPRO Tiger Award at 2010 Rotterdam Film Festival and won prizes at 25fps, Zagreb, Exis, Seoul and L’Alternativa, Barcelona. She is currently editing a new film, I Am A Spy.
“I work with the found object, particularly the still and moving image, as an act of reclamation and re-interrogation. I work mainly with the documentary image to interrogate the relationship between the narrating of history and individual memory. Recently I’ve been focussing on the meaning of the archive, in particular the politics of memory, asking not only why some objects are preserved while others are ignored but also why preservation is made at certain historical moments”. Sarah Wood.
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