Dalia Al Kury is an independent documentary film director working on cross-genre projects. Her films explore different cultural taboos in the Arab world and have been commissioned and screened on international TV channels such as ZDF Arte, Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Her first feature Possessed by Djinn premiered at Hotdocs, and her latest film Privacy of Wounds premiered in competition at IDFA and was nominated for six prestigious awards. She holds an MA in screen documentary from Goldsmiths University and is currently an Artistic Research fellow at the Norwegian film school. For more on her work visit vimeo.com/daliaalkury.
Report during the symposium:
FUTURING JUSTICE
My research project ‘imagining justice’ is my base to investigate how ‘futuring’ narratives can empower people under colonial hegemony today. My hybrid documentary work has been using the technique of ‘staging the self’ to confront stagnant narratives and reveal a more empowered position for my film characters. I am now researching how I can stage my own fantasies as an exiled Palestinian to channel a collective desire for sovereignty and justice. Both the practice of ‘staging’ in documentary and the practice of speculative fiction are deeply rooted in pausing the question: ‘What if’ we alter reality? I use the documentary approach not as a way of documenting reality, but a way of commanding reality through active and radical imagining of justice and accountability. In my presentation, I will show a four-minute scene of my ‘work in progress’ film on futuring the right of return of indigenous Palestinians to their native homeland. I also will show a couple scenes from my previous film Syrialism to highlight how I use archive footage for rooting my speculative fictions in political dystopias of today.
International Committee to Save the Earth Through Speculative Fabulation
Dovilė Aleksaitė, Fee Altmann, Sanja Anđelković, Elisabeth Brun, Belén Cerezo, Suvam Das, Damian Domes, Raquel Felgueiras, Kausik Ghosh, Florian Goeschke, Vanessa Graf, Anouk Hoogendoorn, Kristin Johnsen, Paul R Jones, Dani Landau, Stacy Lo, Madhuja Mukherjee, Roksana Niewadzisz, Christine Reeh-Peters, Marie-André Robitaille, Gonzalo H. Rodriguez, Szilvia Ruszev, Sanja Särman, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Alisi Telengut, Bela Usabaev, Joshua Wagner, Lisa Walder, Dörte Weig