Storm books & candy is launching a seasonal film club.
In tune with winter, this season’s program, Rooted / Unrooted, explores the ties between people and their roots—meditating on memory, belonging to the land, and the forces at play trying to tear us away from them.
The first screening is a feature-length movie, Our Heedless Wars (1995, 52’), in which director Randa Chahal Sabbagh offers a deeply personal reflection on returning to her home country, Lebanon, amidst the ruthlessness of the Civil Wars (1975-1990). A juxtaposition of raw 16mm footage of the wars with intimate video diaries of her family, the film attempts to make sense of Lebanon’s chaotic logic and the filmmaker’s deep roots within it.
The second screening of the program, Food, Land, Power, will be of three short movies followed by a Q&A with artist and filmmaker Youmna Chlala. It triangulates an impossible dinner floating in space between Lebanese and Palestinian friends, the weaponization of food by the US, and the relentless fight to preserve local flora and agricultural knowledge in Palestine. These shorts help us imagine a borderless horizon, reflect on imperial power dynamics from the top down, and how people resist them from the ground up. Screening on March 12. 7pm.
Programmed by Nour Chahal Sabbagh and Nour El Helou.