AFK | Screenings

Toronto Palestine Film Festival Co-Presentation: R21 Aka Restoring Solidarity

Mohanad Yaqubi

September 29, 2024

1:00PM – 2:10PM EDT

Location

TIFF Lightbox

350 King St W, Toronto, ON M5V 3X5

For a map of TIFF Lightbox , click here

Purchase Tickets Here

Documenting an overlooked movement of anti-imperialism between Japan and Palestine, the Tokyo Reels are collection of 20 16mm films. They were safeguarded in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine between the 1960s and 1980s. Into this stunning archive comes a reflection on the movement, known as Reel 21 – an undelivered solidarity letter written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during this powerful, meditative film.

Co-Presented with:

Art Metropole

Re:assemblage

Pleasure Dome

Regards palestiniens

Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

Mohanad Yaqubi

Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production house, Idiom Films. He is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, which focuses on militant film practice. Since 2017, he is a resident researcher at The School of the Art (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium.

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all.

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us.

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.