Screening Rights 2024: Dancing Palestine + Weightless

Screening Rights Film Festival is bringing the latest socially engaged cinema from the Global South to audiences in the West Midlands, and the centrepiece of its 10th-anniversary edition consists of two Palestinian-Ukrainian solidarity screenings. The first of these is dedicated to resisting the perpetual, ages-long genocides through cultural preservation.

At the heart of Lamees Almakkawy’s mid-length film essay Dancing Palestine is dabke, historically a workers' dance that has evolved into a form of remembrance and resistance. Through an ingenious and deeply moving interplay between the material and immaterial, the past and the present, the film combines digital screen-life elements, analogue archives, and dabke performances set against photos of Palestinian landscapes projected onto the dancers’ bodies.

Khrystyna Bunii is an anthropologist who collects the culture of the Hutsuls, a unique ethnographic group of people living in the west of Ukraine. Marta Hryniuk’s and Nick Thomas’s Weightless follows Bunii as she digitises family photos, collects clothes and food recipes, and records tsymbaly music and oral histories of displacement and genocide. What emerges is a fragile yet ever-persistent culture situated at a politically tumultuous crossroads of cultures, languages, and ideologies.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring filmmakers Lamees Almakkawy, Marta Hryniuk, and Nick Thomas, as well as guest curators.