R21 AKA RESTORING SOLIDARITY (+ SCREEN TALK)
MOHANAD YAQUBI | 2022 | 71’

SATURDAY 18 NOVEMBER | 19:00
ICA: THE MALL, ST. JAMES'S, SW1Y 5AH

R21 aka Restoring Solidarity is a film about making a film; a film about films that exist on the margins of documentary, fiction, and an archive. 

R21 refers to The Reel no. 21, which comes as an addition to and a reflection on a collection of 20 16mm films, safeguarded in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine. It’s an undelivered solidarity letter written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during the film.

R21 aka Restoring Solidarity acts as a catalog, the film as a time machine, the film as an archive. The themes that Reel no. 21 deals with, reveal themselves in the form of a montage essay. At the same time, the act of restoring these films brings out motives, aspirations, and the disappearance of a generation and its struggles, not only in Japan, but around the world.

Followed by a screen talk with director, Mohanad Yaqubi, chaired by BAFTA nominated producer and curator, Elhum Shakerifar.