Part of Valentin Noujaïm - In Relation
Valentin Noujaïm
BEFORE SHE FORGETS HELIOPOLIS / AVANT D’OUBLIER HELIOPOLIS
2018, 23 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
“My family have begun to forget their Egyptian roots and, on asking my grandmother Malo to recount the first part of her life in Cairo, I am confronted by the memories of an exiled Arabic woman, lost in a troubled sea of memories, soon to be erased by the passage of time.” –Valentin Noujaïm
Darryl Daley
YOULOGY / NO GHOSTS
2025, 8 min, digital
“YOULOGY / NO GHOSTS explores cyclical motifs of arrival and departure through the artist’s grandmother’s migration to the United Kingdom and her posthumous return to Jamaica, creating a transcendental frame where memory and time merge. In this speculative space, the film navigates beyond the confines of mortality, reimagining a future where inherited stories resist linearity.” –THIRD HORIZON FILM FESTIVAL
Barbara Hammer
OPTIC NERVE
1985, 16 min, 16mm
“[A] powerful personal reflection on family and aging. Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and editing, is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image. Hammer has lent a new voice to the long tradition of personal meditation in the avant-garde of the American independent cinema.” –John Hanhardt, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
Razan AlSalah
YOUR FATHER WAS BORN 100 YEARS OLD, AND SO WAS THE NAKBA
2017, 7 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“She looks down at her virtual ghost marked with an X. ‘If I were walking, I would have found it, even if it’s not here anymore.’ Oum Amin, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Maps Streetview – today, the only way she can see Palestine. The film consists of images from Google Street View accompanied by an imaginary voiceover written by the artist, that of her grandmother who was never able to return to her hometown in Palestine. This invented memory, narrated in voiceover, is nevertheless set in a real colonial context. In this pixelated, stroboscopic landscape, archival images narrating British and Israeli colonization appear.” –Cinéma du Réel
Caroline Monnet
IKWÉ
2009, 5 min, digital. In Cree and French with English subtitles.
“IKWÉ is an experimental film that weaves the narrative of one woman’s (IKWÉ) intimate thoughts with the teachings of her grandmother, the Moon, creating a surreal narrative experience that communicates the power of thoughts and personal reflection. Made by Anishinaabe artist Caroline Monnet, the film reflects the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous knowledge.” –WINNIPEG FILM GROUP / NATIONAL BOARD OF CANADA
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
GRANDMA’S GRAMMAR / LA GRAMMAIRE DE MA GRAND’MERE
1996, 8 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
“An inherited lesson from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s grandmother is transmitted through Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s chronicle of their conversation. Creating a Pan-African exchange, the Cameroonian Bekolo listens to the Senegalese Mambéty root his cinema in his grandmother’s storytelling – a narrative form of returns and repetitions, of continuation and reinvention.” –Yasmina Price
Shenny De Los Ángeles & Amanda Morell (iiritu)
FLORINDA’S DAUGHTER / HIJA DE FLORINDA
2024, 12 min, digital. In English and Spanish with English subtitles.
“Through a series of black-and-white tableaux, this poetry film follows the journey of Young Naomi in Everglades, Florida. She learns from Florinda, her grandmother, about the ancestral practices of caring for the land and nurturing grief in the face of environmental challenges. As the story unfolds, we grow to understand Florinda’s indigenous teachings of controlled burns and the importance of embracing fire rather than suppressing it. As the prescribed burns ignite from Florinda’s hands, an archival portal is birthed.” –BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Followed by a conversation between Yasmina Price and writer, editor, and critic Jessica Lynne!