CINEMA · 🇵🇸🇪🇬
Re-telling: Our Grandmothers Have Known (+ Q&A)
Wednesday, September 23 · 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM · East Village
A curated anthology of six short films exploring intergenerational memory, displacement, and the stories grandmothers carry. Valentin Noujaïm opens with a personal reckoning: his grandmother Malo recounting her life in Cairo before exile, memories fragmenting as time passes. The program widens from there — a Palestinian grandmother navigating her hometown Haifa through Google Street View, a Jamaican grandmother's posthumous return, Indigenous teachings of controlled burns, Senegalese cinema rooted in storytelling, and more.
The films span continents and forms: Noujaïm's digital essay in French, Razan AlSalah's pixelated meditation on the Nakba and colonial erasure, Barbara Hammer's optical-printed reflection on aging and sight, Caroline Monnet's experimental weaving of Cree knowledge, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Pan-African conversation, and a poetry film on ancestral land care. Running time is roughly 85 minutes.
Afterward, writer and critic Jessica Lynne sits down with Yasmina Price for a conversation about what these films hold — the politics of memory, the archive, return, and what it means to witness a grandmother's story before it's lost. Anthology Film Archives is a small, intimate screening space in the East Village; expect a thoughtful crowd and the kind of room where the work lands quietly.