Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices

Ali Cherri, born in Lebanon in 1976, is an artist and filmmaker.

In Sudan, not far from the massive hydroelectric Merowe Dam, Maher, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to build a mysterious monument made of mud. As he constructs his mud tower, revolution is in the air around him, with talk of protests erupting against Omar AlBashir’s rule. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation slowly starts to take on a life of its own.

Still Image from Ali Cherri’s The Dam, 2022. Doha Film Institute Film Library

Ramata-Toulaye Sy, born in France in 1986, is a French Senegalese filmmaker.

In Northern Senegal, Banel and Adama are a young couple that are in love. Beneath the sands are buried houses that Banel dreams of moving into with Adama, away from the stifling traditions of their small village. But extreme lack of rain threatens the residents and puts the interest of the community ahead of those of the couple. Adama will soon be forced to become the village’s new chief, putting an end to their dream.

Still Image from Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama, 2023. Doha Film Institute Film Library

Randa Maroufi, born in Morocco in 1987, is an artist and filmmaker.

Featuring a series of reconstructed situations based on observations made on the border of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil, the film focuses on the economic tensions that arise in that small territory that has become a gateway between Africa and Europe. Maroufi uses the pattern of a stage drawn onto the ground to set up these theatrical situations.

Still Image from Randa Maroufi’s Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s Gate), 2019. Doha Film Institute Film Library

Elia Suleiman, born in Nazareth in 1960, is a Palestinian filmmaker.

Leaving Nazareth for the bustling metropolises of Paris and New York, Suleiman turns his signature observational style from Palestine to a broader world, full of comparable tension, absurdity, and paranoia. In each new city, Suleiman is wide-eyed with curiosity and wonder, yet time and again, something always seems to remind him of the place he was born in. The film won the Jury Special Mention and FIPRESCI Critics’ Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.

Still Image from Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, 2019. Doha Film Institute Film Library

Lamia Joreige, born in Lebanon in 1972, is an artist and filmmaker.

This silent video animation represents a wide view of the Beirut harbour. This multilayered video is conceived as an amalgam of different vernacular photographs (from The Arab Image Foundation, The Fouad Debbas Collection, and An Nahar Documentation Center), taken at various times, each referring to a specific moment of history. Elements of the image disappear while other appear almost imperceptibly. However, the image remains suspended between past and present, appearance and disappearance, reflecting a time that is non-linear. In a single image, a ship from the 19th century floats in a photograph of sea from 1950, under a menacing skyline in the 80’s.

Still Image from Lamia Joreige’s Beirut, 1001 views, 2010. Collection of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar

Hassan Khan, born in the UK in 1975, is an Egyptian artist, musician, writer, and filmmaker.

Jewel opens with flashing lights gradually transforming into the form of an anglerfish accompanied by original music, created by the artist, informed and developed out of the shaabi genre; an urban music form with roots in the Egyptian popular classes. This mesmerising loop is the simple depiction of two men dancing. It is a restaging of a scene the artist encountered on a street in Cairo in 2006. That scene, only glimpsed, formed a vivid mental image.

Still Image from Hassan Khan’s Jewel, 2010. Collection of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar

Larissa Sansour, born in East Jerusalem in 1973, is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker.

This short film resides at the intersection of sci-fi, archaeology, family history, and global politics. Combining live motion and CGI, Sansour explores the role of myth in the shaping of national identity: an imagined resistance group makes underground deposits of porcelain, suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to support future claims to their vanishing territories. Once unearthed, this buried tableware will prove the existence of these counterfeit people.

Still Image from Larissa Sansour’s In the Future They Ate from The Finest Porcelain, 2015. Doha Film Institute Film Library