GRAMNet Film Series Queens of Syria & Cartographers

Queens of Syria tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of The Trojan Women, the timeless Ancient Greek tragedy about the plight of women in war.

What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like themselves, uprooted, enslaved, and bereaved by the Trojan War.

Winner of the Black Pearl Award for Best Director from the Arab World at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, 2014, and Special Mention from the UNHCR at the 3rd edition of the Human Rights Film Festival in Tunis 2014 (Human Screen Festival 2014).

Blending the register of the ethnographic interview with the mechanical vision of the aerial view, Valentina Bonizzi‘s film describes the migrant experience between alienation and the imaginative genius of the quotidian resistance.

Cartographers registers the unprecedented role of cartography employed by a generation of Italians who experienced migration, whether physically or imaginatively, and the direct influence of World War II. Cartographic production is generally associated with power dynamics dictated from above. Cartographers is loaded with a different cartographic experience: the mapping of space and time operated from underneath, traced through the intimate and uncertain relief of memories, calibrated on variable shades of sensible experiences.

Cartographers is commissioned by Cultural Documents, funded by Arts & Business, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Cultural Documents, and kindly sponsored by IFS World Wide.

We are very happy to confirm that Valentina Bonizzi will be joining us to talk about Cartographers, alongside a video link up with Reem, one of the protagonists from Queens of Syria.