Discussing FRIENDSHIP’S DEATH (1987, UK, 78 min)
Director: Peter Wollen
Language: English
anorak, 13th Feb., doors: 7:30 pm, starts: 8pm
Gottlieb-Dunkel-Straße 43/8. Stock, 120

“What alien joins the militant resistance?”

A discussion with Philip Rizk in conversation with Hazem Jamjoum & Nick Helm-Grovas.

In ‘Friendship’s Death’, an extraterrestrial being on a peace mission to Earth lands by mistake in Amman, Jordan instead of MIT. There they experience the Jordanian army’s brutal attacks on the Palestinian resistance fighters during “Black September”. Only one course of action makes sense.

Hazem Jamjoum
is a Palestinian educator and an editor with the recently-established publishing house Maqam Editions.

Nicolas Helm-Grovas
is a writer based in Berlin. His book ‘Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-cinema’ will be published later this year. He is currently co-editing a three-volume collection of Peter Wollen’s writings, forthcoming from Verso.

Philip Rizk
is a filmmaker & writer from Cairo living in Berlin. In a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is, “how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?”

A note on this special discussion and screening:
We have decided to organize a discussion around this film, despite it showing at the Berlinale, for the following reasons:

❊ Peter Wollen is no longer alive and we have learned that screening Friendship’s Death in a festival which stands for genocidal tendencies would not have aligned with his politics

❊ we agree with Edward Said’s assessment of the film from a 1988 review - “Wollen’s achievement is particularly distinguished, not only because of the nobility and purity of his daring but because he is, after all, an outsider. To have done the right thing and to have done it so authentically, this says a great deal about Wollen —and about Palestine.”

❊ most importantly, we believe that Friendship’s Death is the kind of film that starts a conversation of this kind, a conversation we believe is not possible within the context of the Berlinale, as is evident by their erasure of any mention of Palestine in the film’s description. Together with our invited guests Hazem Jamjoum & Nick Helm-Grovas, we would like to talk about the political and historical context of the film, the role of Palestinian resistance and what we believe to be uncanny similarities between the film and the moment we are living today.

on.strike.berlinale