Join us for a film screening of Partition by Diana Allan, followed by a roundtable discussion with Ilana Feldman, Nazli Akhtari, Jasmin Habib, and Diana Allan, and then a reception.
Awarded the Grand Prize for National Feature Competition at the Montreal International Documentary Festival, and best international feature at FIDOCS Santiago, along with several other awards, Partition (2025), brings together found footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told. Bringing forms of sensory and synesthetic attention to bear on these colonial images and narratives, Partition stages an encounter between ways of knowing and telling and employs dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to deconstruct and reconstruct colonial seeing. Recentering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, it considers how colonial pasts might be unravelled through the soundscapes of a radically unstable refugee present, how listening disrupts an overdetermined politics of looking, and the lines of continuity that might be drawn between then and now.
Diana Allan is a filmmaker and professor of anthropology at McGill University. She is the co-director of the Nakba Archive and holds a Canada Research Chair in the anthropology of living archives. Her films include, So Dear, So Lovely (2018), Terrace of the Sea (2010), and Still Life (2007), and her publications include Voices of the Nakba: A living history of Palestine (2021) and Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (2014).
This event is co-sponsored by the MMSP Research Cluster; the EU-funded MSCA Archivwar Project; the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; and the UW Anthropology Department and Palestine Research Support Fund.
