This Was Tomorrow
Admission starts at $5
July 23, 2024, 8:30pm
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for Speculative Futures and Fabricated Memories, the third of the four-part series This Was Tomorrow, presenting cinematic visions of the future that illuminate and comment on our present-day realities.
The films and videos in this series challenge common perceptions of time, identity, technology, and community, in a curated selection that invites thoughtful reflection while also promising entertainment. Each evening will present a thematic pairing of an artist film(s) with a cinema feature, showcasing the diverse and innovative possibilities of science-fiction storytelling.
Screenings take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from July 16–25, 2024, and begin after sunset.
III. Speculative Futures and Fabricated Memories
Tuesday, July 23, 8:30pm
The films in this screening explore how speculative narratives manipulate and empower the understanding of the past and future. They investigate futures where memory and historical narratives are reconstructed to serve different purposes.
Maha Maamoun, 2026 (2010, 8 minutes)
An iconic scene from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962) of a man traveling back in time in post-apocalyptic Paris is re-enacted here in a deserted building in contemporary Egypt. The reading of an excerpt from The Revolution of 2053: The Beginning (2007), an Arabic-language science-fiction novel by Egyptian author Mahmoud Osman, has been dubbed over the photographic sequence. Maha Maamoun created this video a year before the revolution of 2011 that toppled then-resident Hosni Mubarak. The afterlife of 2026 in the Egyptian political context lends an additional resonance to a work already meditating on the nature of memory, teleology, and cause and effect relations. Viewed today, the video appears to foretell real-world events, while returning us to the present time of its production on the eve of a revolution by narrating a scene set on the threshold of a fictional revolution.
Larissa Sansour, In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2015, 29 minutes)
In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain blends live action and CGI to tell the story of a Palestinian resistance group planting fictional archaeological evidence to influence historical narratives. The film explores themes of identity, heritage, and the power of storytelling. Sansour uses a speculative premise to comment on the political manipulation of history and the construction of cultural memory.
Neïl Beloufa, Kempinski (2007, 14 minutes)
Kempinski is a science-fiction documentary set in a village in Mali, where the inhabitants are invited to describe their visions of the future as if they were living them in the present. Beloufa’s film blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, capturing surreal and speculative narratives that challenge our perceptions of time and identity. This work fits seamlessly with the theme of reconstructed memories and speculative futures, offering a unique perspective on how present identities shape imagined worlds.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.