Cinematographies of Resistance: Noor Abed

Noor Abed conjures images that bring to the fore the strong relationship between the Palestinian people and their land, using a poetic collage of song and dance.

Penelope
16mm film, colour, no sound, 6 min, 2014.

Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, the film looks at the role and relevance of mythology to the present and to the collective imaginary. Filmed in Palestine in 2014, the piece reimagines Penelope as a solitary female figure, weaving a quilt made of dead fish. Through a continuous act of sewing, she is returning to a past memory simultaneously, evoking a poignant meditation on displacement and dispossession. The work attempts to reflect a reality other than the one history offers. Here, myth could be seen as a collective dream and public imagination.

our songs were ready for all wars to come
super 8mm film, colour, sound, 20 min, 2021.

Choreographed scenes based on documented folktales from Palestine, the film aims to create a new aesthetic form to re-awaken latent stories based around water wells and their connection to communal rituals around notions of disappearance, mourning, and death. our songs were ready for all the wars to come explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge, and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can ‘folklore’ become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it?
The only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales. Captured through mediums of film and sound, situated stories are archived and represented, creating a context that explores the capacity of social formation, and the possibility of recalling a memory that is capable of decentralizing images of fixity; a memory that is liberated from monuments.

A Night We Held Between
digitalni transfer 16mm filma, colour, sound, 30 min, 2024.

The film centers around “Song for The Fighters,” which was found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act.
The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine—caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys—the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

Noor Abed (1988, Palestine) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2016-17. She was a fellow at the Raw Material Company in Dakar in 2019, and in 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. She was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/ Museu Tàpies Film Production Grant in 2022, and her film 'A Night We Held Between' was selected as a first-prize winner of the e-flux Film Award 2024. Abed is the Grand prize recipient of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Her book 'Stars at Midday' was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024.

Cinematographies of Resistance is a multiannual program launched by Leila Topić (Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb) and Dina Pokrajac (Subversive Festival). The program is dedicated to presenting international filmmakers who create work at the intersection of contemporary art and film strategies and practices, fusing the expressive possibilities of art film, film essay and openness to experimentation. The Cinematographies of Resistance is interested in auteurial positions that seek to resist mainstream canons, with an approach that is characterized by intermediality and intertextuality, open to engage with a variety of topics. The resistance from the program’s title is manifested in the search for new models and approaches in contrast to the established ways of thinking about cinematic medium, expanded photography as well as film and multimedia art in general. As part of the Cinematographies of Resistance program, so far we have presented the works and video installations by Maud Alpi (2018), Sabina Mikelić (2019), Nicole Hewitt (2021), Jasmina Cibic (2023), Nika Autor (2023), Milica Rakić (2024) and Driant Zeneli (2025).