Cinerevolt: PFLP Declaration of World War (Kōji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, 1971)

By: börek - January 16th, 2025  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday January 19, 2025, Cinerevolt: PFLP Declaration of World War * directed by Kōji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi * 1971 * Japan * 71 minutes * in Japanese, Arabic, English, French with English Subtitles * doors open at 20:00 * intro & film start at 20:30.

The atrocities that are happening in Palestine right now not only destroy the present and the future of Palestinians and the oppressed throughout the world, they also aim to eradicate their past. One of the magics of Cinema is precisely preservation of a reality which is constantly hidden from our eyes, and few movies give us such a view of the Palestinian experience as this one.

In 1971, after attending the Cannes Film Festival, filmmakers Kōji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi traveled to Lebanon, where they met with Japan’s Red Army faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to create a propaganda newsreel supporting the Palestinian resistance. The PFLP was a major Marxist-Leninist Organization concerned with the Palestinian Cause and Resistance. In many ways, it serves as the antithesis of the Contemporary Western view of Palestinian Resistance and the Arab World; Secular, Progressive, Internationalist and Socialist. One of their most eminent figures and their spokesman -Ghassan Kanafani- provides exclusive interviews for this movie.

This film is Propaganda, and it is aware of this fact. It is aware of the fact because it openly claims it, and does not present dog whistles aimed at misleading the viewer. Does this make the film less objective though? Does this positionality mean that the movie cannot be neutral? I would claim that the only way to have access to the truth of the Palestinians.
From exclusive interviews with Kanafani, footage of training from PFLP and Japanese Red Army members, the movie draws a line in the sand, and it lets you know which one is the correct side.

“The Epic is for Israel and Documentary for Palestinians” – Jean-Luc Godard

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

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Lebanese movie night: The Ugly One (Eric Baudelaire, 2013)

By: börek - February 5th, 2023  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 19 February 2023, Lebanese movie night: The Ugly One by Eric Baudelaire (and Adachi Masao) * 2013 * 100 minutes * In multiple languages * subtitles in English. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30
Set in the Beirut of the 2010s, this movie follows two fictional paths to arrive at an intimately personal documentary. Baudelaire’s characters, or rather his ensembles of characters, are people whose history is intimately entangled with revolutionary movements. In this film, with the help of Adachi Masao he sketches a kind of brotherhood between two countries with intense political histories: Japan and Lebanon. It’s an entanglement that might seem unlikely. But that only makes it more poetic, it doesn’t make it any less real.

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images was in 2012 the first UK solo exhibition by French artist Eric Baudelaire whose work looks at the complexities of recounting the history of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), a radical group that emerged from the 1968 Tokyo student movement, settled in Beirut in the early 1970s, and engaged in sophisticated terrorist activities in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. As a filmmaker, Adachi devoted his life to images. During his years in Lebanon, he sought to advance his radical film practice by trading the camera for the rifle.

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

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