The short film Abgad Hawaz will be followed by the feature presentation of Terrace of the Sea.

Programmed by Tara Hakim

Abgad Hawaz
Robin Riad • 2 min • Canada • 2024

Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Nawaz is a way for her to hold close to her language, culture, and roots.

Terrace of the Sea
Diana Allan • 52 min • USA/Palestine/Lebanon • 2009

In Terrace of the Sea, anthropologist, author, and filmmaker Diana Allan offers a sensorial glimpse into the lives of the Ibrahim family, a displaced family who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The family live in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 as a result of the Nakba, on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon.

Composed almost entirely of static shots and voiceovers, which are punctuated with folk songs, and anchored in a collection of family photographs taken over three generations, the film looks at the family’s relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they’ve persevered in this ‘temporary’ home. In actuality, they have been living in this camp for fifty-eight years. The big blue sea, fishing nets, a little girl with a balloon, women chatting, a temporary permanent home, memories of meeting a love, memories of being in an Israeli prison, the sound of the sea, shadows flickering, light bending, and lamenting folk songs. Through attending to the environment itself, Allan disrupts the continuity of linear narrative and explores an alternate experience of time, where past and present, old and new, sit side by side. The film examines the family’s history not solely or primarily through the lens of nationalist politics, but through their life as fishermen and sensory details of everyday life and living.

Note on the programme: TQFF has invited queer Palestinian-Jordanian artist Tara Hakim to curate and write the programme notes for two programmes this year: Port of Memory + I Would Like to Visit, and Terrance of the Sea + Abgad Hawaz. While not all the films in this program are queer in theme or created by queer directors, TQFF remains committed to showcasing works that reflect the diversity and nuances of queer sexuality and gender beyond the cisgender binary. As queers, we also recognize the necessity of opposing systems of apartheid, imperialism, and ethnic cleansing. Israeli tactics of socio-economic deprivation severely restrict Palestinian cinema, and our friends at Queer Cinema for Palestine have done invaluable work bringing queer Palestinian cinema to Toronto audiences. In order to work alongside their efforts without repetition, TQFF and Tara have sought out other films highlighting Palestinians subjectivity, which remains underrepresented in mainstream media.