PROGRAMME:

Short film screenings, 1.30-2.30pm

Saeed Taji Farouky سعيد تاجي الفاروقي has selected four short films which complement Another Sky’s focus on sonic experimentation. These avant-garde SWANA films have a sense of musicality and rhythm: old home movies; overheard slices of songs on the radio; the imagined auditory horror of suburban automobile hell; musical archives as political resistance; military archives subverted into absurdist kitsch. All examine new forms of fragmented landscapes and layered narratives, challenging both traditional narrative structure and the dominance of the image in conventional filmmaking.

Lina Laraki, Halves Through Night (2021)

Part horror, part audio installation, Halves Through Night is a transcendent exploration of barzakh, the Persian term for a transitional space between the living and the dead, through a sonic journey with a sentient car in a Roubaix suburb. Halves Through Night explores this veiled space in which beings are suspended, disembodied from the real, and no longer belong to any place.

Karim Kassem, Mr. Wool (2018)

Beiruti home videos capture a family entertained by the absurd, repetitive obsessions of Mr. Wool, a man who is never satisfied with his car parking. From the director of Octopus, winner of the Envision Best Film award at IDFA 2021.

Anoushka Berberian and Olivia Melkonian, Unseen Singers (2021) (2021)

A musical and auditory journey in memory of the victims and survivors of the Armenian genocide. Part travelogue, part investigation of fading memories, the film both records a process of remembering, and sculpts a memorial itself.

Kamal Aljafari, Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022)

The latest act of archival sabotage from one of the region’s most defiant experimental filmmakers. Using found footage from Israeli military propaganda films, Aljafari uses the strategy of the “cut-up” to undermine the myth and transform it into an absurd Sisyphean folly.

Workshop, 2.30-3.30pm
Building a Sonic Archive: exploring audio as a tool of resistance

Hosted by Olivia Melkonian, this participatory workshop challenges traditional archiving concepts and presents the practice as an accessible art form and community tool. Drawing from oral history techniques, participants will develop methods of producing creative audio rooted in documentary practices and resistance.

If you would like to participate, please come with an audio clip you would like to work with – a recording of ambient sound, singing, voices, anything that to you represents an important memory, and therefore archival material. A digital file on your phone is perfect.

Another Sky is a new London festival celebrating experimental music from the SWANA (South West Asia & North Africa) region and diaspora. Our artists, whose backgrounds span Armenia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia & Türkiye, elide genre and category to bring beats, improv, ambient soundscapes, pieces composed for classical and non-western instruments, moving image, voice, machine-learning technologies and more.

Visit our website for the full programme: https://anotherskyfestival.com/

To purchase solidarity tickets – to help fund discounted tickets for those who need them – please visit https://anotherskyfestival.com/

Another Sky is made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, PRS for Music Foundation Open Fund, The Marchus Trust and the Hinrichsen Foundation