OFF THE WALL encounters

For this Fall/Winter 2023/2024, Salim Mrad and Irene Bartolomé will be presenting a public program that comprises a group of feature films made in the last ten years and never shown in this part of the world that experiment with the cinematographic form to contest dominant powers in a subtle, intimate and creative way. With Tatiana’s questioning patriarchal rules in a coal town of Patagonia, Khalil brother’s on Native American traumatic circularity of history, Bo and Pan look on Hong Kong and the function of cities in the development of the capitalist system, Sabine’s re-orchestration of archival sources to interrogate Dutch colonial logic, and Payal’s letter on love and revolt under the nationalist rule of India’s prime minister, these films not only propose ways of reconsidering our present, but explore the cinematic potential with radical and original dispositifs.

Salim Mrad was born in Beirut in 1987. His filmography includes short documentaries, medium-length fictions, a feature documentary and a film trilogy around the nude body. After teaching cinema for ten years in Beirut, he is now fully committed to his film and literature projects.

Irene Bartolomé is a filmmaker born in Barcelona, and living in Beirut. For the past ten years, she works professionally as a video editor. She was a part of the feature film Demonstration (2013) a collective project directed by Victor Kossakovsky. She directed the short Lunch time (2017) and co-directed with visual artist Tessa Rex the short The Williamsburg houses (2016). Currently, she is in post-production of her first feature film.