Program #1: Two Rivers and a Wind

DAY 2: Our Eyes Have Exhausted the Vocabulary of Death

Borrowing its title from Etel Adnan’s Jenin, this program brings together films that challenge the colonial and authoritarian use of visual media. By reframing archives as spaces of resistance and reclamation, these works highlight memory’s survival and vulnerability, offering insights into how storytelling can preserve histories, forge solidarity, and foster hope amidst loss.
Organized into three sections—Two Rivers and a Wind, Resisting Oblivion, and Vocabulary of Absence—the program traverses landscapes of conflict and displacement, connecting stories across borders to expose shared struggles and resist erasure.

Program #1: Two Rivers and a Wind

Two Rivers and a Wind examines the role of visual media in occupation and dispossession. Spanning Taiwan, Palestine, and Buryatia, these films reveal the structures of occupation and preserve ancestral memory, reclaiming visual media as a tool for solidarity.

Short film program:

Water Sleep II Akaike River under Xizang Road (D: Su Yu Hsin; Taiwan 2019; 10'; English/Japanese/Traditional Chinese, English subtitles)
Maps are controlled by nation-states: who creates them, what they will look like, how they will be read, and how they will be shared. water sleep II Akaike river under Xizang Road is an essay film which the artist guide us to find the lost river in historical maps.

We Have Always Known the Wind's Direction (D: Inas Halabi; Palestine 2019-2020; 11'; Arabic, English subtitles)
Fragments of landscapes and voices cohere into a rich exploration of the unrepresentable in this film about the possible burial of nuclear waste in the South of the West Bank and the invisible networks of power that control the region.

The River I Grew Up With (D: Natalia Papaeva; The Netherlands 2022- 2023, 30'; Russian/Buryat, English subtitles)
"The River I Grew Up With" captures Orlik's landscape and family tales, blending Buryat and Russian through a bilingual mother-daughter duo. Papaeva uses red and green text to depict a family's view of a shifting culture.

Curated by Vincent E., Sarah Savalanpour and Shadi Tabibzadeh