BURNT: To Be In A Time Of War

PROGRAM
✦ A Night We Held Between, Noor Abed, 2024, 30min

Myth, ritual and longing at Palestinian sites intertwine with archival songs and photos. Landscape holds cavernous memory, grief, and strength.

✦ Towards the Sun, Nour Ouyada, 2019, 17min

You are now in the main hall of the National Museum in Beirut. A guard reminds you that you are encouraged to touch the archeological objects. A voice in your headset suggests that you lick the stone. You are now facing a hole in the wall on the lower left corner of a mosaic. The voice in your headset indicates that it was made by a sniper. Out of curiosity, you dial 1-9-9-1 to listen to the rest of the story.

✦ Memory of the Salt, Noor Aburafeh, 2025, 11min

The film centers on the mythologies surrounding salt and on its history, long intertwined with starvation. Salt has been used to preserve food through scarcity, and was vital during famines—natural or man-made—as in late Ottoman Palestine under British colonialism, and today in Gaza under Israeli genocide. Footage from the Dead Sea in Jericho, Palestine, is interwoven with archival fragments. A lullaby, inspired by Moroccan songs from what was known as The Year of Hunger/The Year of the Locust, draws from a regional literary tradition using promise to call the morning closer. Sung to children before sleep, these songs soothed their hunger while stones were boiled as a pledge of a future meal.

READING
✦ To Be In A Time Of War, Etel Adnan, 2016.

The Third Cinema Club (formerly Film/Book Club) is a series of screenings and collective readings that reimagines the radical legacy of “the third,” envisioned as a revolutionary, anti-colonial cinema positioned outside both commercial and individualistic (auteurist) art film. Conceived as a feminist and diasporic space of study, witnessing, and imagination, the series moves fluidly between film and text, cultivating practices of solidarity, critical thought, and collective world-making.

✦ 27. September 2026, 16:00–19:00
✦ Location: Anwandstrasse 9, 8004 Zürich.