My SDI

Join SDI in partnership with Take One Action Film Festivals for an online masterclass with Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna (director of Foragers), exploring her approach to hybrid filmmaking and using cinema to interrogate power, land and histories of place.

Foragers is screening as part of Take One Action Film Festivals 2022 taking place in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. More info about the film and tickets here. 

This event will be captioned. 

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

She has participated in multiple film festivals including Berlinale, Viennale, BAFICI, IFFR, Cairo Cinema Days, Goteborg film festival, Ambulante, Cinéma du Réel, Art of the Real. Her Wild Relatives (2018) won CPH:DOX’s New Visions Award, Sheffiheld Doc’s Environmental Film Award, DokuFest Kosovo’s Green Dox Award, and Palestine Cinema Days’ Sunbird Award. Manna’s solo exhibitions include Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA, Antwerp (2021); Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain (2019); The Setting of Noon, Home Works Forum 8: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2019); A Small Big Thing, Henie Onstad Museum, Høvikodden, Oslo (2018); A Magical Substance Flows into Me, Mercer Union, Toronto (2017), Malmö Kunsthall, Malmo (2016), and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015).

Foragers

In occupied Palestine, foraging for wild ‘akkoub and za’atar – traditional foods that Palestinians have gathered from the land for generations – is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Threading together fiction, documentary, and archival footage, Foragers reveals how Israeli legislation in the name of natural conservation constitutes yet another means of erasing Palestinians from their land – and of deciding which lives are worthy of protection. Spellbinding and utterly transportative, Foragers examines wild food as a living terrain for omnipresent settler colonial violence, but also unassailable Palestinian resistance.

Resources / Further reading: 

• 'Where Nature Ends and Settlements Begin' - E-flux journal essay, with the research behind Foragers
• 'Foraging as Resistance' - The Common Table (interview with Jumana Manna)
• Watch, Read, Think, Act: Foragers (reading list by Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh)
• 'In Jumana Manna’s Film, a Wild Plant Crosses the Political Line' - review by Will Heinrich, New York Times

Films: