A FIDAYEE SON IN MOSCOW - Pentedattilo Film Festival

A FIDAYEE SON IN MOSCOW

DECEMBER 7 - DECEMBER 11

Borgo Antico di Pentedattilo - free entrance

A FIDAYEE SON IN MOSCOW by Farah Saleh

2014 Young Artist of The Year Award ©

 

After the 82’ Israeli war on Lebanon, the Palestinian leadership shattered all over the Arab World and the PLO future was uncertain. Hoping to secure a safer and a more stable life to their sons, some of the Palestinian left leaders decided to send their sons to an international boarding school in the Soviet Union, the Interdom. The school was built in 1933 in Ivanovo North--‐East of Moscow to host children of revolutionary parents from all over the world as a form of solidarity between nations, including the children of Mao, Tito, La Pasionaria and my brother.

The interactive video dance installation portrays a school day in the Interdom from a physical point of view. It provides gestures and movements students used to do in their history class, singing class, physics class and creative writing class, while also analyzing the historical context of the school. The installation asks the public to try these gestures themselves as an attempt to make them live the Interdom experience.

This work is a form of self--‐historicization and re-appropriation of the history of a certain socio-political group, more than a form of nostalgia for a certain era, and if so, it would  be for a nostalgia that is prospective, which reflects on the past and present of the  children of the left of a certain generation, while questioning the future  of the current one.

FARAH SALEH

Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dancer and choreographer active in Palestine, Europe and the US. She has studied linguistic and cultural mediation in Italy and in parallel continued her studies in contemporary dance. She has been dancing and choreographing with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company since 2010, for which she recently created Ordinary Madness (2013) and Hana and I (2014). She also took part in and toured internationally with Keffiyeh/made in China (2012) and Badke (2013) co-produced by the Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS), A.M Qattan Foundation and Les Ballets C de la B. Saleh has also been teaching dance, coordinating and curating artistic projects since 2010 with the Palestinian Circus School, Sareyyet Ramallah and the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival. In 2014 she won the third prize of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) for her installation A Fidayee Son in Moscow and in 2016 she won the dance prize of Palest’In and Out Festival in Paris for the duet La Même. She is currently touring with her latest pieces Free Advice (2015), La Même (2016) Cells of Illegal Education (2016).