Talks
TALKS 2025
KAMAL ALJAFARI AND XAVIER BASSAS
Conversation between philosopher Xavier Bassas and Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, following his latest film A Fidai Film.
Place: Filmoteca de Catalunya Date: Saturday 22/2 at 18:00
Kamal Aljafari (Ramle, 1972) is a filmmaker and artist. His films have screened at festivals and museums worldwide, including Fondazione Prada, Tate Modern, Locarno Film Festival, Berlinale, London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Viennale, A Fidai Film (2024) was premiered at Visions du Reel where it received the Grand Jury Prize, since then the film has been selected to numerous festivals earning the film 15 international awards. Recent retrospectives of his work were held at IndieLisboa and Anthology film Archives NY in 2024. Kamal Aljafari has taught at The New School NY and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. He has received a fellowship from the Film Study Center-Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University (2024–2025).
Xavier Bassas (Barcelona, 1978) holds a PhD in French Philology and Philosophy from the Sorbonne-Paris IV University and the University of Barcelona, where he currently teaches in the Department of French Studies. His work focuses on the relationship between language, politics and aesthetics and on the translation of contemporary French thought. He has edited several volumes on French literature and thought, specialising in the work of Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, about whom he has translated and written extensively. He was co-director of the Jornades Filosófiques de Barcelona during its eight editions (Arts Santa Mònica, CCCB and Institut Français de Barcelona, 2010-2017). He is the director of the collection ‘Pensamiento Atiempo’ (Casus Belli eds.). He has recently published the monograph Jacques Rancière. El ensayo de la igualdad (Gedisa, 2017, in Spanish in 2019); a book in dialogue with J. Rancière himself, El litigio de las palabras. Diálogo sobre la política del lenguaje (NED eds., 2019, translated into several languages), Los treinta ingloriosos, also by J. Rancière, (Ed.Laertes 2002, in Catalan, Ed. Katakrak 2023, in Spanish). With the artist Raquel Friera, he founded the Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido at MUSAC in León, an interdisciplinary project of contemporary art, philosophy, literature and political reflection on time that works with various national and international institutions.
FROM TIRE DIÉ BY FERNANDO BIRRI
Conversation by the Argentinean filmmaker Martín Solá after the screening of Tire Dié and Los Totos.
Place: Filmoteca de Catalunya Date: Sunday 23/2 at 18:00
From this session, we will take a trip to the ‘New Latin American Cinema’, we will go in search of ‘another look’ that this cinema proposes to us, through the works of authors such as Margot Benacerraf, Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas and Fernando Birri himself, to arrive at the current situation of Latin American cinema, and especially of Argentinean cinema, threatened by the new obscurantism-inquisitorialism of today.
Martín Solá, studied documentary filmmaking in Barcelona and film directing in Argentina. Since 2008 he has been teaching at different film schools and universities in Barcelona, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam and Calabria. As a filmmaker, his first short film Àpat a casa de família was selected for the Biennial Jeune Création Européenne 2006/2007 and was screened as a video installation for a year in different European museums. He has made five feature films: Caja cerrada (2008), Mensajero (2011), Hamdan (2013), La familia chechena (2015) and Metok (2021). His films have won awards at festivals such as Visions du Réel Nyon, Cinema Verite Iran, DocBarcelona, Festival dei Popoli, Documentamadrid, Las Palmas International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Tandil Cine, among others. His films have been commercially released in Argentina, Spain and Mexico.