Borders That Flower: The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing / Women Beyond Borders
Sat 11/14 • 7:30PM PST
Billy Wilder Theater
In person: Q&A with UCLA Asian American Studies Assistant Professors Loubna Qutami and Nour Joudah, moderated by UCLA Comparative Literature Ph.D. student Aciah Abdulsater.
Guest speaker
Every space hosts the accumulation of time and is thus a repository of memory, one that is active and dynamic.
Jean Khalil Chamoun’s Women Beyond Borders (2004) and Theo Panagopoulos’ The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (2024) were made two decades apart, but together they foster an ongoing conversation at the intersection of identity, memory and place across Lebanon and Palestine.
Though distinct in form, the films consider the relationship between people’s lived environments and their individual and collective identities. The films navigate through spaces both historically and presently marked by displacement, violence and resilience. Both offer meditations and testimonies on how these spaces can inhabit a people’s memories, linger into their present realities and influence their futures.
Rather than attempting to unearth a singular tradition, this program amplifies an ongoing cinematic conversation across Lebanon and Palestine that is rooted in intertwined histories of occupation and resistance. This conversation is an urgent one to hold today in light of the ongoing aggression against southern Lebanon and historic Palestine that continues to target complete ecosystems. This systematic surge of destruction and harm affects far beyond the physical; it seeks to fracture memory, sever a people’s sense of being and belonging, and jeopardize social relations that places sustain. The moving image as a tool presents an opportunity to forge an alternative place of memory work, one capable of preserving spatial memory, making visible the forms of erasure, and imagining continuities that exceed the violence of occupation and its imposed restriction on bodies and space.
Programmed by UCLA Comparative Literature Ph.D. student Aciah Abdulsater and Archive Research and Public Access Coordinator Nicole Ucedo. Notes and concept by Aciah Abdulsater.