Culture has always been targeted in the genocide of the Palestinian people. This talk approaches filmmaking as life-writing in conditions of genocide, where family photographs, film archives, and cultural institutions become sites of struggle over memory, survival, and the right to narrative. Drawing on histories of cultural loss and erasure in Palestine—from the theft of family photo archives in 1948, to the looting of the Palestinian film archive in 1982, to the targeting of cultural centres in 2024, such as Rashad Shawa in Gaza and the Jenin Freedom Theatre—filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky asks:

What does it mean to make creative work when the very materials of cultural memory are under threat?

Key questions addressed in this lecture include:

• How can life-writing practices—including filmmaking—contribute to the resistance against occupation and to Palestinian liberation?
• How should we understand the value, limits, and responsibilities of such work in a state of emergency, such as the one currently ongoing in Gaza?
• How can we navigate the UK cultural landscape in which solidarity with Palestinians is suppressed or criminalised?

Touching on life-writing, filmmaking, and cultural memory, this talk will be of interest to readers, writers, filmmakers, students, and scholars working across literature, film and media, visual culture, politics, and human rights. It will also appeal to those interested in archives and testimony, as well as the ethics of making and sharing creative work in times of genocide, occupation, and state violence. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Saeed Taji Farouky is a Palestinian/Egyptian filmmaker who has been making films around themes of conflict, human rights, and colonialism since 2005. His latest feature documentary, A Thousand Fires, premiered as the opening film in Directors’ Fortnight at the Locarno Film Festival 2021, where it won the Marco Zucchi Award for most innovative documentary. His previous documentary, Tell Spring Not to Come This Year, premiered at the Berlinale 2015, where it won the Audience Choice Panorama Award and the Amnesty Human Rights Award, and was sold to Netflix. Farouky is also a radical film educator, regularly teaching, leading workshops, and lecturing about alternative forms of cinematic storytelling. He is the designer and lead tutor of the Radical Film School, a free film course based in London dedicated to political filmmakers from marginalised backgrounds.