01.04.26 – 05.04.26, Courtisane Festival, Notes on Cinema

“Home, a relationship for life.” The words flash by in the blink of an eye, yet they feel instantly recognisable and relatable. We read them imprinted on a billboard promoting brand new high-rise apartments in a faraway place. But we could just as easily have found them close to where we are now. Few words seem to have the universal appeal that ‘home’ has. Of all the anchors we use to create a sense of stability and reliability amidst the endless waves of intensities and contingencies that constantly threaten to overwhelm us, the idea of ‘home’ is perhaps the one we are most attached to. Yet, like all attachments, this one too is not only imbued with desire and fantasy, but it’s also fraught with contradictions and ambivalences. In order to manage them, we tend to rely on conventions and institutions: horizons of fulfilled identity and normative expectations by which we measure our lives. But what if these ideologically infused conventions and institutions constrain our well-being? What if they are experienced as all too generic, reductive, or even oppressive? What would it take to reimagine ‘home’ and the life-building organized around it in ways that are as yet unimaginable?

The question of home runs like a red thread through this year’s festival programme. Contrary to its common characterization as a space untainted by movement or difference, the films in Measures of Distances explore how movement is experienced in relation to home, and how home is formed in relation to histories of individual and collective movement. In The World I Left Will Not Leave Me, its image as a privileged safe space or frictionless refuge is questioned from a transclass perspective, in which the return home is marked by estrangement or divergence. Elsewhere in the programme, in the films of Razan AlSalah, Basma al-Sharif, Ahmad Natche and others, the state of exile and displacement becomes a lens through which the experience of home is examined and shaped in its absence.

For many, ‘home’ serves as a placeholder for narratives of belonging, as the proper site for providing a life plot that promises a future. But like all narratives that might be lived, they require a world that can sustain it. A variety of films in this festival programme zoom in on the growing tensions between home and world, and the struggle to remain attached to life-organising imaginaries and fantasies even when the world continues to fail them. But they also point us to potentialities — ones that are opened up when we refuse to reduce the possibilities of life to one plot and start improvising on the ‘normal’ life of lived desire. Counter to those who fear instabilities of privilege and entitlement and embrace ‘home’ as a site of sameness, these films challenge those narratives that are anchored to images of racial, religious, class and national monoculture. More than anything, they are asking us: what would happen if the energies that are all too often routed into producing narrowed versions of home and identity were rerouted toward more expansive and generous sociabilities and worlds?