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A MAGICAL SUBSTANCE FLOWS INTO ME

Palästina/ D/ GB, 2016, 68 min
von Jumana Manna

An ode to music that undoes the distinction between 'Arabs' and 'Jews', national borders and political differences.

A magical substance flows into me opens with a crackly voice recording. The voice is that of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film, Jumana Manna—herself a Palestinian from Jerusalem—follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. She asks these individuals to perform, and they do.

Zu Gast: Jumana Manna

(Eintritt 6€/4€)