Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (Eyal Sivan, 2009)

Sunday 27 March 2022, Movie night: Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (Eyal Sivan, 2009), 86 minutes, English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

In deconstructing the world famous ‘Jaffa oranges’ brand and probing its iconographic history director, Eyal Sivan delves into orientalist fantasies of the Holy Land and the Zionist promise of a “desert” that colonists would be bringing to “bloom”. Sivan uses photographic and filmic archives, poems and paintings, to narrate the history that goes back to a once economically thriving Arab Jaffa, whose prolific and profit-generating orange groves attracted local and neighboring labor in droves for picking, packaging and export. After the Nakba and the expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Israeli state rebranded ‘Jaffa’ as a symbol of an Arab-free Israel. Sivan interviews historians, political analysts and workers, retracing how an orange harvest, once the site of a cooperation, transformed gradually into a symbol of the escalating conflict and war.

Eyal Sivan, is a documentary filmmaker and theoretician based in Paris. Born in 1964 in Haifa Israel and grow up in Jerusalem. After exercising as a professional photographer in Tel-Aviv, he leaves Israel in 1985 and settled in Paris. Since he is sharing is time between Europe and Israel. Known for his controversial films, Sivan directed more than 10 worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. His cinematographic body of work was shown and awarded various prizes in prestigious festivals. Beside worldwide theatrical releases and TV broadcasts, Sivan’s films are regularly exhibit in major art shows around the world. He publishes and lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary filmmaking and ethics, political crimes and representation, political use of memory, genocide and representation, etc.
Presently Sivan in an Honorary Fellow at Univerty of Exeter UK, he is teaching at the Master in Film at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam and he is member of the editorial board of the Paris based publishing house La Fabrique Editions.
http://eyalsivan.info/

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net