Film Screening: Reel No. 21 A.K.A. Restoring Solidarity (2022), Mohanad Yaqubi, 70', AR/EN/JP/en

Please join us for a film screening and fundraiser for mutual aid to Gaza at the St Antony’s College Buttery on 12 June from 6-8pm.

Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRta5Dqm7s&t=22s&pp=ygUkcjIxIGFrYSByZXN0b3Jpbmcgc29saWRhcml0eSB0cmFpbGVy

“R21” comes as an addition to and a reflection on a collection of 20 16mm films, safeguarded in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine. It’s an undelivered solidarity letter written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during the film.

“R21 aka Restoring Solidarity” acts as a catalog, the film as a time machine, the film as an archive. The themes that Reel no. 21 deals with, reveal themselves in the form of a montage essay. At the same time, the act of restoring these films brings out motives, aspirations, and the disappearance of a generation and its struggles, not only