But We Need to Add Tartness
Sister Mother Lover Child
Nadia ShihabIt is spring yet all is colored by a season of grief. A child dances, the grapevine ripens. We press our ears to the glass and hear singing from afar. Suspended, together, we are an unlikely constellation. I hold the frame until I find the form. Sister mother lover child.
Images Festival is committed to providing an accessible festival and continues to work to reduce barriers to participation at our events. This year, we are implementing a COVID-19 policy to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission for all, and to prioritize the participation of people who are disability-identified, immunocompromised, or part of an otherwise vulnerable group.
The following guidelines will be in place: Self-Assessment: We ask that staff and participants screen themselves for COVID-19 before visiting the exhibition.
But We Need to Add Tartness is a program that intimately details the lives of women, the love that resonates between them, and what drives them together. Sister Mother Lover Child by filmmaker and artist Nadia Shihab and A Name for What I Am by director Marta Pessoa and writer Susana Moreira Marques both consider sufficiency, collectivity, and the strength found in culture and community.
In her 18-minute, present-day slice-of-life film, Nadia centres the home as a place of assembly where a family of women seems to be both in a state of preparation and maintenance in the aftermath of an unnamed event that has brought them together. Sister Mother Lover Child focuses on one family’s home, whereas A Name for What I Am contemplates the domestic sphere of an entire nation.
Guided by what has now become a fundamental book of feminism, Women of My Country: 1948-1950, written by Maria Lamas, Marta and Susana’s feature film meanders across the country, ruminating on the women of Portugal, their rituals of cohabitation, the tensions therein, and how these might change across decades.
Though guided by different circumstances, each film is attentively wrapped in resiliency and warmth.
Please join us for a conversation with Nadia Shihab following the program.
Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker whose work explores the personal, the relational and the diasporic. Her feature film Jaddoland won five festival jury awards, and her work has screened at Cinema du Réel, DOXA, BlackStar, Camden, Kassel Dokfest, and Cairo International Film Festival.
Marta Pessoa is a film director and director of photography born in Portugal. A Name for What I Am is her fifth film.
Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist living in Lisbon. She has published two books of non-fiction and her work has been translated into several languages. Her new book, drawing on research and writing for the film A Name For What I Am comes out in April 2023.