MoCA Skopje Summertime Cinema – In the Presence of Absence

Evening screening at the MoCA Skopje

In the Presence of Absence | Bodies in exile are often seen as dispensable, approached through generalising, disempowering representations of danger or pity, through technologies of surveillance or philanthropic campaigns. The two selected films convey the directors’ experience as precarious subjects in situations where fragility comes to the fore, yet they keep up, endure, reflect, and dream. Whether waiting trapped in the water or the grey asylum service rooms, both films evoke an aquatic feeling, an abstract vision of reality, a time extension that contrasts with the urgency of the situations lived.

It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus, Kamal Jafari, 2019, Germany, 16 min

An old woman leans to the young man with the yellow book sitting next to her and asks, “What are they distributing here?”; “Numbers”, he replies. In Berlin’s waiting rooms, where metal and wooden seats are nailed to the ground, people arrive after emerging from the seas. Here they wait. Kamal Aljafari’s short film collapses time, questioning the meaning of life in a system in which humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways. This surreal film observes the origins of our being versus the future of how we are defined. It’s a long way from Amphioxus, we all came from there.

Purple Sea, Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020, Germany, 67 min

“I see everything,” she says, as if it was a curse. Brilliant sunshine, clear blue skies. The sea is calm, framed by a piece of railing. A peaceful moment if it weren’t for the fact that the sea is standing upright, vertical, like a waterfall. A rush of images, twirling, upside down, jolting. People in the boat, in the water, screams, life jackets, emergency whistles. There’s no horizon anymore, no sky, no up or down, only deepness and nothing to hold on to. Even time’s flow comes to a halt, contracting into the brutal present. She is filming and speaking. To beat being tired, being cold, the fact that help isn’t coming. To beat dying, just for something to remain.

The screenings will take place at the southern terrace of the Museum at 21:00 in English.

The films were organized by Sofia Grigoriadou and suggested by Delphine Leccas. Leccas curates screening programs, art exhibitions, and multidisciplinary events for festivals, art organizations, and museums in Europe and the Middle East. She was the artistic director of the “Rencontres internationales des cinémas arabes” (Marseille, 2016-2020). She co-founded the non-profit organisation AIN (Paris, 2008) focusing on contemporary artists from the Arab World. In Damascus (1998-2011), she managed the cultural program at the French Cultural Centre and the exhibition program for the event “Damascus, Arab Capital of Culture”. Recently, her itinerant program “Who Knows What Yesterday Will Bring?” in collaboration with locus athens, was screened at Makedox, at the MoCA Skopje.