The Tokyo Reel Film Festival is a performative film festival that assumes its programming from a collection of 20 films that were safeguarded by a Japanese solidarity unit with Palestine and subsequently digitized, restored, and subtitled by the collective Subversive Film. It is a one-time film festival, with a fixed program, a poster to mark the event, a catalogue, and a 100-day running schedule at Gloria Kino in Kassel. The performance involves interventions on issues related to expanding the limits of thinking around concepts such as restoration, activation, and representation, while at the same time writing an account of a gesture of solidarity that has been overlooked, overshadowed, and dismissed. Through a film program of an archival film collection, such a practice becomes a vehicle of alternative narratives, that are independent, personal, and cinematic. The contribution will include an overview of the Tokyo Reel film festival performance at Documenta 15 and the panel discussions that were conducted during the festival, as a way to excavate knowledge not only around the restored films, but also about its context, situated in its time and space, between Japan and the Middle East.
Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light on historic works related to Palestine and the surrounding region, to engender support for film preservation and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Ramallah and Brussels.
Speakers: Mohanad Yaqubi