Tuesday, August 20, 2024 at 7:30pm
Queer Palestine + Mohammed Soueid's Cinema Fouad
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Light Industry is hosting another evening with one of our favorite magazines, Pinko (“Communism for fags!”). The program is occasioned by their recent publication of Queer Palestine, assembled to raise money for direct relief in Gaza. “For this publication,” they write, “we invited queer Palestinian comrades to curate a small archive of queer Palestinian life. Against the annihilatory Zionist drive targeting Palestinian life in general, which ratified itself perversely in the name of its queers, we wanted to host a record of that which was said to be a contradiction in terms.”
As a complement to this collection, one of the guest editors will introduce a screening of Cinema Fouad (1994, digital projection, 40 mins). Its director, Mohammed Soueid, is often dubbed Beirut’s first video artist, and here his focus is on a young Syrian trans woman then living in Lebanon. We find Khaled El Kurdi casually putting on her makeup as she speaks, with poise and candor, about her time as a belly dancer and a soldier, about her memories of movie stars and past loves, as well as her efforts to save up for surgery. Like Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason or Jean Eustache’s Numéro Zéro, the piece consists almost entirely of an interview, one in which the simplicity of form reveals the richness and complexity of the subject.
Copies of Queer Palestine will be available for sale at the event.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
All proceeds from book sales and the box office will be donated to Queer Palestine’s Gaza contributors.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.