• Thu 20 10 2016 •
Between Fences Avi Mograbi

20:00

Avi Mograbi, Between Fences, 85′, France, Israel 2016, color, Hebrew, Tigrinya with English subs

Venue: Filmforum at the Museum Ludwig, Bischofsgartenstraße 1, 50667 Cologne
3 €
Ensuing talk in English

In cooperation with the ifs internationale filmschule köln

Over the last years, about 45,000 refugees from Eritrea and Sudan have reached Israel, whose policy toward asylum seekers is one of temporary non-deportation. Denied basic rights and access to social services, asylum seekers are pressured to return to their home countries and held at an isolated facility deep in the Negev desert, called Holot. There, thousands of people are subject to interminable administrative detention, even though Israel’s Supreme Court recently ordered the camp’s closure. In their new film Between Fences, filmmaker Avi Mograbi and theater facilitator Chen Alon initiate a theater workshop with refugees and other participants at Holot. Drawing upon the techniques of Augusto Boal’s “theater of the oppressed,” they illustrate situations of helplessness and unwantedness, problematizing the situation of discrimination against refugees in a country that itself was once founded by refugees. The screening is followed by a conversation between Avi Mograbi and artist KATARINA ZDJELAR on the potentials and pitfalls of art directly involving refugees.

Avi Mograbi is a filmmaker and video artist based in Tel Aviv. He began filmmaking in 1989 and has been teaching documentary and experimental film at Tel Aviv University and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem since 1999. His documentary films have been programmed and awarded at festivals worldwide.