speaking from the I eye #5

Subversive Film and Hasib Hourani examine and enact narratives of solidarity in this speaking from the I eye program. A screening of four short films from Brussels and Ramallah based collective Subversive Film’s Tokyo Reels project, is accompanied by the reading of a newly commissioned poem by Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani who lives on unceded Wangal Country.

The Tokyo Reels are a collection of twenty 16mm films that were held by a Palestine solidarity group in Japan. The films were made by directors from Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, the UK, Italy, Germany, and Japan, exposing the internationalist scope of militant filmmaking during the period of 1960-80s. Entrusted to Subversive Film after a screening of one of Subversive’s films in Tokyo, the films have since been digitised, restored, and presented in different formations across the world. Militant cinema asks the question of what can film do? How can it mobilise people in the context of a liberation struggle? The Tokyo Reels project offers a response. The films carry with them layers of transnational solidarity in the form of Japanese voiceovers and subtitles. They occupy the screen filled with the defects of scanned film, bringing traces of the past into the present. As Subversive Film write, ‘Tokyo Reels is a ground set for asking questions, expansive reading, presentation, translation and occasional speculation, as methods of recirculation and redistribution of films, solidarity making and friendship.’

Hasib Hourani has co-curated a selection of four short films from the Tokyo Reels that speak to the overlap between the Lebanese and Palestinian fights for liberation and the fact that the Palestinian struggle is one of geopolitics rather than nation alone. He responds with a newly commissioned poem.

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Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective founded by Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi. The collective aims to cast new light upon historical works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Brussels and Ramallah. 

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on unceded Wangal Country. His debut book, rock flight, was released with Giramondo (AU) and Prototype (UK) in 2024, and with New Directions (US) in April 2025.