OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts Presents

The Lonely Trees by the Rojava Film Commune

The Lonely Trees (2017, 43 min) is a documentary about the “dengbej,” who carry the heritage of music, poetry, and storytelling in the semi- autonomous region of Rojava.

This event is part of Archival Collective Counter–Imagination, a two-part series curated by art historian and current CHRA Fellow Lara Fresko Madra.

The series brings together two collective endeavors —the Rojava Film Commune and the Material Aesthetic Research Collective — to think through not only who archives belong to, but how they generate a sense of belonging. In engaging the moving image as a site of negotiation and building collectivity, these endeavors are concerned with how such media can create and re-create past and future community. Brushing the archive against the grain, is it possible to listen to its absences? This program explores the two group’s modes of social organization around the moving image that cross and, at times, defy the horizon of the nation-state. 

Komîna Fîlm a Rojava (The Rojava Film Commune) is a commune of filmmakers based in the eponymous autonomous region in northern Syria. Their work across the region builds and develops infrastructures for filmmaking, screening, and education, fostering new audiences and an awareness of filmmaking as a medium for empowerment and a tool for liberation. The commune’s creative output spans documentary and commercial films as well as public service announcements. 

Lara Fresko Madra is an art historian, writer, and curator with a PhD in Art History from Cornell University. Her research focuses on contemporary artistic practices from Turkey and the Middle East that challenge official history and offer alternative ways of relating to the past. She is currently a teaching and research fellow at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. 

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For more information, call 917-370-5279, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://chra.bard.edu/event/lonely-trees/.

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema

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