Mahmoud Darwish: In the Presence of Absence, Maryam Tafakory, 2025, Iran-United Kingdom, 15’, digital file.
“Aesthetic is only the presence of the real in the form,” says Darwish in the poem “Antithesis” (2005), which he recites in the images reused by Maryam Tafakory. In a delicate balance between content and form, Tafakory’s film becomes a mirror of this mutual determination between correctness and justice.

Darwish, la reapropiación de la memoria-geográfica, Cristina Hadwa, 2020, Chile, 8’, digital file.
“Using Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry as a starting point and through archives, both familiar and taken from other films, we weave our personal narrative as a tool for reappropriating lost history and geography.”
Cristina Hadwa

Recollection, Kamal Aljafari, 2015, Palestine-Germany-Lebanon, 70’, digital file.
“The image grows larger and before us a face emerges that was hidden. We see it now, pixeled. But pixels don’t matter as they are not an aesthetic or technical matter, but a political matter… in “Recollection” there’s a found footage work. Aljafari turns invisible to visible making disappear what used to be the protagonist. The roles are inverted: hegemonic and subordinates, oppressors and oppressed, masters and servants. What was once in the forefront is erased and only the sets and the passersby are left. Using material from Israeli fiction films shot in Jaffa between the ‘60s and the ‘90s…, the director executes a new montage that, as Walter Benjamin proposed, “interrupts” history and retrieves what has been ignored; he brings those images back to the present time, into the light, and launches them into the future.”
Maia Gattás Vargas, Hau-Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, 2015