EMST and the Athens Palestine Film Festival present Familiar Phantoms, an experimental short documentary about memory, history and trauma.

The film is inspired by Sansour’s own family history and her childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining scenes shot in an abandoned mansion, Super 8 footage and private photographs, the montage mimics the workings of memory, constantly returning to the same images along with new fragments in search of meaning. Throughout the film, the mansion serves as the seat of memory. Vignettes are played in the rooms, adding a theatrical dimension, magnifying and exaggerating the narrative elements, just as memory constantly reshapes, amplifies, adds and subtracts. While most scenes are performed by actors, in other scenes objects and memorabilia are transformed into sculptural installations – a dark space decorated with dozens of hanging cages of love birds, a group of stuffed seagulls sitting on the floor, or a free-standing sink full of lemons.

The film is in Arabic, with English and Greek subtitles.

Thursday, 24 October 2024, at 19.00 and 21.00