The Image Insists | Cinema of Resistance

From critiquing Hollywood and media stereotypes to exposing the double standards that still shape colonial and migratory borders, two films reveal what an image can still do once it has been turned against the power that made it.

The screening events are part of 'The Image Insists', a curatorial program by artist and researcher Vivek Jain. Within this framework, screenings held at various locations envision cinema as an assembly that offers an opportunity for remembrance and collective resistance. This season the series in organised in collaboration with EKKM, Kai Cinema and Kartul.

Three films, made across thirty-five years, work on images that already exist: borrowed, broadcast, archived, or shelved for decades. They ask who gets to be seen, on whose terms, and what an image can still do once the world it recorded has been altered or destroyed. Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990) by Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum dismantles the Hollywood and media images through which Palestinians and Arabs have been seen. Anas Qadamani's The Elephant and the Room (2024) uses a strange news story about elephants to expose the double standards that still organise colonial and migratory borders. Kamal Aljafari's With Hasan in Gaza (2025) returns to footage shot in 2001 and asks what an image owes to a place that is no longer there. Together, the films move from critique to testimony, treating the archive as contested ground and cinema as a way of holding what history threatens to erase. Furthermore, by imagining cinema as assembly, this curation insists on remembrance as resistance.

Other screenings of the series will include:

- November 4 at 18:00 'With Hasan in Gaza' (2025) by Kamal Aljafari in Kai Cinema

- November 30 at 18:00 'Foragers' (2022) by Jumana Manna in Sõprus Cinema. This screening is also an extension of EKKM's current exhibition 'We Have a Land of Words' curated by Evelyn Raudsepp.