JOIN US for MOVIE NIGHT #31

The Dream (المنام) (1987)
by Mohammad Malas

16.06.2026
7 pm
Guest Host: Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun

Abteilung Angewandte Fotografie
OKP - Schwanzer Trakt
4. Stock - Stiege 2
Oskar-Kokoschka Platz 2, 1010 Wien

Mohammad Malas traveled in 1980 to Lebanon, aiming to recover Palestinian subconscious. He lived in camps across Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ain al-Hilweh, and Rashidieh and interviewed more than 400 people. Resistance in The Dream is not only armed — it is mnemonic. To remember Palestine in sleep, to refuse its erasure even in unconsciousness, is an act of profound defiance. The film’s love is equally unmistakable: love for children who dream of horses, for elders who dream of olive groves, for fighters who dream of homecomings that never came. Each recalls the reality of their everyday life, transposed eerily into their dreams, nightmares, and premonitions — ultimately converging on what the Palestinians have had taken away from them: their homeland and the dignity it afforded them. The history shadows every frame.

Viewers are cursed with a particular foreknowledge: they know that mere months after these interviews took place, under the light of Israeli flares, Kataeb genocidaires will enter these camps. One may occasionally forget this fact in the tenderness of the film’s images — but the knowledge cannot be entirely banished or forgotten. In 1982, the Sabra and Shatila massacres occurred, taking the lives of several people Malas had interviewed, and he stopped working on the project. Grief paralyzed him. When he returned to the footage in 1986, the film had become an act of mourning as much as documentation. He turned 400 interviews into 23 dreams and 45 minutes of screen time — both diary and film present these people somewhere between present and past tense, preserved forever in the word, magnetic tape, and now digital code.

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MOVIE NIGHTS is a screening series for a transdisciplinary exchange, that was initiated to oppose the persistent silence about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Starting each time from one film we open the space for conversations about the relations between production of images and their conditions, involving modes of narration, authorship, history, politics and effects on society. We watch fiction, documentaries, movies and television productions focusing on filmmakers with antizionist and liberatory practices.

MOVIE NIGHTS are hosted and organized by the sections Applied Photography, Art and Communication Practices, Klasse für Alle, Philosophy, and Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.






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