Following the projection of his newest film Tales of the Wounded Land (2025) at Cinema Nova October 3rd, Abbas Fahdel joins us for a masterclass on cinema as a tool to process trauma, to encourage resilience and to organize resistance.
Oscillating between a desire for a contemplative cinema and its impossibility in a context of colonial disruptions, Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel has been navigating spaces of emergency since his very first engagement with cinema. Circumstances have made such that his cinema touches both on highly personal and highly political issues, making him a chronicler of voices of those who disappear unnoticed due to the systemic violence of colonial empires. Such was the case with Homeland: Iraq Year Zero(2015) and also with Bitter Bread (2019). For this new film, Fahdel persistently and compassionately documents the ongoing erasure of his current homeland in the South of Lebanon. He makes his wife and his 3-year-old child protagonists in this radically personal and meanwhile universally tragic tale of repeated destruction and resurrection.
How can a cinema of emergency be thought in relationship to spectatorial comfort in certain (Western) contexts? Which audiovisual economies can be unlearned, which new ethical relations could be activated? How can the apparatus of film forge improbable but lifesaving solidarities?
This event is an initiative of Gawan Fagard in the context of a research seminar at ULB, taught jointly with Xavier García Bardón and Karolina Svebodova and the ongoing research project Fireplace Cinema at RITCS school of arts, in collaboration with Cinemaximiliaan and Cinema Nova.
Participation to the event is free, please sign up in advance through gawan.fagard@ulb.be
Time: Monday 5 October 2026, 10 am – 1pm (followed by a lunch)
Location: Cinemaximiliaan, Rue de Manchester 36, 1080 Brussels
Entry : free registration here: gawan.fagard@ulb.be (free donation for lunch)
Language: mostly French, also English and possibility for Arabic