Lost Futurities: New Arab Science Fiction

Short film program and conversation with Nat Muller
Wednesday 23.11.22

Why do we crave signals from outer worlds? How do imaginary futures look like from a present where hope seemed crushed?

This short film program, which includes films by Fadi Baki, Monira Al Quadiri, Maha Maamoun, Larissa Sansour and Rania Stephan, presents a rare collection of new Arab science fiction. Innovative and genre-bending, in the last decade sci-fi has flourished in moving image from the Middle East - from Lebanon, Palestine to Egypt and Kuwait. The reinvestment in the genre can be seen as signaling loss, but also as a defiant encouragement to keep on pushing for change in what is pervasively perceived as hopeless geo-political situations.

The event will be introduced by curator and researcher Dr. Nat Muller, whose PhD Lost Futurities: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art from the Middle East is the first study of its kind, and followed by a conversation between Muller and filmmaker Mira Adoumier. The screening is part of the program series Suspended Presents, Stolen Futures: Sci-Fi, Humor and Nostalgia in New Arab Cinema.

About the program

In this short film compilation, the history of modern Lebanon is re-written through the perspective of a worn-out robot, a childhood memory from Kuwait is reconstructed as alien-abduction conspiracy, while a man in Egypt travelling in time foresees a scene set in the aftermath of a fictional revolution. Another man is trapped in time and space, fulfilling a scientist’s obsession with eternity, and finally, a solution to the Palestinian state is envisioned in the form of a single skyscraper housing the entire Palestinian population.

About the films

Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow

Lebanon | 2018 | 30 min | directed by Fadi Baki | language: Arabic with English subtitles

A young filmmaker investigates the legend of Manivelle, an automaton gifted to Lebanon in 1945 that still haunts an abandoned mansion in Beirut. After being coaxed back out into the limelight, the people who knew him come forward to speak their mind, and the myth that Manivelle has constructed around himself begins to unravel. A science-fiction mockumentary out of Lebanon, Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow is a funny, sad and weird look at the life of the Middle East's First and only living robot and the stories you won’t find in your history books.

Threshold

Lebanon / Egypt | 2018 | 11 min | directed by Rania Stephan | language: Arabic with English subtitles

Entirely taken from an old Egyptian science fiction film called The Master of Time (1987, directed by Kamal el Sheikh) about an illuminated scientist wanting to extend human life, Threshold is built on the intuition that if the original film was emptied of all its fictional elements, retaining only the transition shots featuring doors, gates and boundary crossings, it would reveal its quintessence: its obsession with eternity. Despite the plot being evacuated from the film, enough of the fiction seeps in for the viewer to grasp the narrative threads. The viewer joins the main character Mr. Kamel in becoming stuck in both space and time, thus fulfilling the scientist's prophecy.

2026

2010 | 9 min | directed by Maha Maamoun | language: English

An iconic scene from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962) of a man traveling back in time in post-apocalyptic Paris is re-enacted here in a deserted building in contemporary Egypt. The reading of an excerpt from The Revolution of 2053: The Beginning (2007), an Arabic-language science fiction novel by Egyptian author Mahmoud Osman, has been dubbed over the photographic sequence.
Maha Maamoun created this film a year before the revolution of 2011 that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak. The afterlife of 2026 in the Egyptian political context lends an additional resonance to a work already meditating on the nature of memory, teleology, and cause and effect relations. Viewed today, the film appears to foretell real-world events, while returning us to the present-time of its production on the eve of a revolution by narrating a scene set on the threshold of fictional revolution.

The Craft

Kuwait I 2018 I 16 min I directed by Monira Al Qadiri I language: English

Housed in the obsolete atmosphere of an artificially constructed American diner, The Craft is a film that revolves around childish fictions laced with serious suspicions towards the real world. Using the lens of family history, the film dissects the artist’s own past to reexamine an uncanny relationship taking place in the shadows of her major life events: “Were my parents conspiring with aliens behind my back?” Reality gradually disintegrates like quicksand around this central question, as paranoia and speculation begin to take hold. Futuristic architecture, popular culture, dream readings, junk food, alien abductions, geopolitics, international diplomacy, war and peace; all of these once solid staples of modern life now become tinted with a general sense of distrust, overshadowing everything. Like a ticking time bomb at the center of the nuclear family unit, the suspicion reaches a crescendo when the protagonist suddenly discovers that the American century has finally ended.

Nation Estate

Lebanon | 2012 | 9 min | directed by Larissa Sansour | language: Arabic with English subtitles

A 9-minute sci-fi short film offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East. With a mixture of computer-generated imagery, live actors and arabesque electronica, Nation Estate explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. In Sansour’s film, Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – now finally living the high life. Each city has its own floor: Jerusalem on the 13th floor, Ramallah on the 14th floor, Sansour’s native Bethlehem on the 21st and so on. Intercity trips previously marred by checkpoints are now made by elevator. Aiming for a sense of belonging, the lobby of each floor reenacts iconic squares and landmarks.

In conversation

Nat Muller

Nat Muller, PhD, is an independent curator, writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD Lost Futurities: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art from the Middle East at Birmingham City University in 2022. Nat is an expert in contemporary art from the Middle East and curated the Danish pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, showing Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour. She has curated shows at major venues, including Eye Film Museum Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, The Mosaic Rooms in London and ifa Gallery in Berlin and her writing has been published internationally in art magazines and academic journals. She has also written numerous catalogue and monographic essays.

Mira Adoumier

Mira Adoumier is a Lebanese and French filmmaker living in Oslo. With an initial background in psychology, philosophy and biology, she later on completed a degree in film Production at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal. Through her work with fictional short films and film essays, she explored characters living at the margins of in-between worlds, while also in parallel experimenting with the formal aspect of the image. Her first feature film, Errans premiered at CPH:DOX 2020 in the next:wave competition. She is also part of The Camelia Committee, a collective that explores hybrid forms of writing for and in cinema.

About the filmmakers

Fadi Baki

Maha Maamoun

Larissa Sansour

Larissa Sansour was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Bethlehem in Palestine. She works mainly with film, and also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. Her work often uses science fiction to address social and political issues, dealing with memory, inherited traumas, power structures and nation states. Her work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, Sansour represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale and in 2020, she was the recipient of the Jarman award. Larissa Sansour lives and works in London, UK.

Rania Stephan

Rania Stephan is an artist and filmmaker born in Beirut, Lebanon. Stephan graduated in Cinema Studies from Latrobe University, Australia and Paris VIII University, France. She has directed videos and creative documentaries notable for their play with genres, and the long-running investigation of memory, identity, archaeology of image and the figure of the detective. Anchored in the turbulent reality of her country, her documentaries give a personal perspective to political events. She gives raw images a poetic edge, filming chance encounters with compassion and humour. Stephan's feature film The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) was internationally acclaimed and won numerous prizes. Her art work is represented by Marfa’ Gallery Beirut. Rania Stephan lives and works in Beirut.

Monira Al Qadiri

Kuwaiti visual artist Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983, Senegal) received a PhD in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts. Her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle East stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. Her work explores unconventional gender identities and the legacies of corruption. She is a founding member of the artist collective GCC. In 2016 Al Qadiri was accepted for an artist residency programme at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Suspended Presents, Stolen Futures: Sci-Fi, Humor and Nostalgia in New Arab Cinema is a program series curated by Mira Adoumier and Silja Espolin Johnson with support from the Norwegian Film Institute.