In the lecture performance Unmade Film: The Proposal – the last work of the Unmade Film series – Uriel Orlow returns to the very beginning of the project, looking backward and forward at the same time. As a film proposal, Unmade Film: The Proposal connects his own family history, the village of Deir Yassin and questions around narrative structures and the eventual impossibility of making this film. The live format combines story-telling, autobiography, and interrogation with the act of witnessing on the part of the audience.
The works assembled under the title Unmade Film take as their starting point the mental hospital Kfar Sha'ul in Jerusalem. Initially specialising in the treatment of Holocaust survivors – including a relative of the artist – it was established in 1951 using the remains of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin that had been depopulated in a massacre by Zionist paramilitaries in April 1948. Unmade Film probes the spatial and narrative layering of the Holocaust and the Nakba, addressing conflicting narratives without comparing them and engaging with blind spots of remembrance and psychological aspects of trauma and haunting.
Unmade Film was developed over a two-year period of research and production between 2011 and 2013. The work and its different elements evolved out of exchanges and collaborations with psychologists, psychiatric nurses, historians, musicians, pupils, amateur actors, curators, artists and others.
Unmade Film: The Proposal already took place earlier this year at Les Complices* in conjunction with the launch of the Unmade Film publication. In response to the continued interest Les Complices* added a second performance date to this year's program.
Please note that the lecture performance will be held in English.
