Throughout 2020, we will make a number of films available to watch from our website. We will share a new film each month, launched with a communal screening and a live discussion.
5-12 July: available to watch online from this page
Sunday 5 July, 6.30pm: communal viewing
Sunday 5 July, 8:00pm: live discussion
Tickets – Free / £2 / £4 / £6 (see our ticket scale here)
Proceeds from this screening will be donated between Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust and Show Racism the Red Card Scotland
Dir. Jumana Manna
2016, Palestine, 66 mins, Arabic with English subtitles
SDH subtitles available
cert PG
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me weaves through musical traditions of various communities living in and around Jerusalem. Manna took as her starting point German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s field recordings of ‘Oriental’ groups in Palestine in the 1930s and his Oriental Music radio series made for the Palestinian Broadcasting Service (1920-1948). In the film we follow Manna as she revisits the communities that Lachmann studied – including Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians. Over the course of her travels she visits homes, offices, recording studios, and places of worship, replaying Lachmann’s recordings and makes new recordings of her own. Interspersed with these are scenes from her own family home in East Jerusalem.
Listen to Jumana Manna in conversation with Negar Azimi, Senior Editor of Bidounmagazine
This screening is part of Film FeelsConnected, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk