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Tagged: witnessing

Newspaper front page with a headline in Spanish about an attack on the Israeli embassy.

Conversations / EUME

Who Owns a Story? Palestinian Memory, Family Archives, and the Ethics of Witnessing

Nada El-Kouny in conversation with Hadeel Assali. In 1969, Golda Meir’s government drew up a secret plan to move up to 60,000 Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and resettle them in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay. Only a handful made the journey before the scheme was exposed. One of them was Mahmoud, a nineteen-year-old who boarded a plane believing he was bound for work and a future in Brazil, and who realized only later that the promise was a lie. Decades on, his great-niece, the anthropologist Hadeel Assali, has spent years documenting his story and those of the other transferees. Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part investigative documentary series, for Uncovering Roots co-produced by Max Saakyan, Nada El-Kouny and Nadeen Shaker tells this story.

Old photograph of a boy, above it a rubber stamp.

Reviews

Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence

By Judith Sieber. With the thematic focus “Witnessing Witnessing”, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) 2025 took up the question of second degree witnessing “to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.” This text is not a review of the festival – both the plurality of approaches and the political discussions that took place were far too complex. Rather, it is an attempt to think along the line of three of the films shown and to try to explore the meaning of witnessing in the current moment. The author takes a look at three films – “Das falsche Wort” (English The Lie, 1987) by Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, “Empty Metal” (2018), a feature film directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, and “Vents Violents” (Two letters to Chantal Akerman) from 2025.