‘A Magical Substance Flows Into Me’ (2016, Jumana Manna)
Date and time: Saturday, Sunday, July 5, 2020, 6:30 pm to Sunday, July 12, 2020, 6:30 pm British Summer Time (UTC+1)
Tickets (£0-£6) here.
Available to stream: Jumana Manna, A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016, Israel/Palestine, 66 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles)
We are pleased to be able to make a number of films available for live streaming from our website throughout July and August. Each film will be launched with an online discussion.
Our next film is: Jumana Manna, A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016, Israel/Palestine, 66 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles & SDH subtitles for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing)
- 5-12 July: available for streaming
- Sunday 5 July, 6.30 pm: communal viewing
- Sunday 5 July, 8 pm: live online discussion
- Sliding Scale ticket price – please see below for details
- Password to access the film and discussion will be emailed to you
Proceeds from this screening will be donated to Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust and Show Racism the Red Card Scotland
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me weaves through musical traditions of various communities living in and around Jerusalem. Jumana Manna took as her starting point German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s field recordings of ‘Oriental’ groups in Palestine in the 1930s and his Oriental Music radio series made for the Palestinian Broadcasting Service (1920-1948). In the film, we follow Manna as she revisits the communities that Lachmann studied – including Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians. Over the course of her travels, she visits homes, offices, recording studios, and places of worship, replaying Lachmann’s recordings and makes new recordings of her own. Interspersed with these are scenes from her own family home in East Jerusalem.
Of the film, Manna has said: ‘I chose not to emphasize borders, in terms of what is Palestinian territory and what is Israel given that Lachmann’s radio program took place before the partition of Palestine. I thought of Lachmann’s program as radio waves spilling out across a territory, defining a certain polity, and participating in shaping the territory. In a sense, when making the film, I physically follow those waves. I follow the path of Lachmann’s research, performing the radio waves as I travel to the different parts of the country bringing the recordings on my smartphone to where these groups live – even more segregated today than before.’
SDH subtitles for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing will be available via the CC button in the video player.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently in San Sebastian, Bolzono, Paris, Berlin and Beirut (2019); Dublin, Taipei, Sante Fe and Basel (2018); and Toronto, Cleveland, Athens, Venice, Bordeaux, Barcelona and Oslo (2017). A Magical Substance Flows Into Me was co-commissioned by the Sharjarh Art Foundation and Chisenhale Gallery, London with Malmo Konsthall, Sweden, and the Biennale of Sydney.
Sliding Scale: What Should I Pay?
In order to make our event as accessible as possible, you can chose what you pay based on your circumstances – you won’t be asked for any proof / ID, we just ask that you are honest. Find out more about the options here.
