PROGRAM A: 140 minutes

OUT OF PLACE: MEMORIES OF EDWARD SAID
A documentary by Japanese filmmaker Sato Makoto (1957-2007)
140 minutes/colour-b&w/2005
English/Arabic/Hebrew (English subtitles)

Summery: Borrowing its title from the author's 2000 memoir, Out of Place traces the life and work of Edward Said (1935-2003), the Palestinian-born intellectual who wrote widely on history, literature, music, philosophy and politics. Filmed in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and the U.S., this feature-length documentary traces Said's childhood influences and celebrates his intellectual legacy, especially the importance of his work in literary criticism and postcolonial studies, his love of music, his role on the Palestinian National Council, and his troubled relationship with Yasser Arafat.

PROGRAM B: 90 Minutes 

Edward Said On Orientalism
Produced & edited by Sanjay Talreja
Executive Producer, Director & Editor Sut Jhally
40 minutes/ 1998 Courtesy: Media Education Foundation

Summery: Edward Said's book Orientalism has been profoundly influential in a diverse range of disciplines since its publication in 1978. In this engaging and lavishly illustrated interview he talks about the context within which the book was conceived, its main themes, and how its original thesis relates to the contemporary understanding of "the Orient" as represented in the mass media. "That's the power of the discourse of Orientalism. If you're thinking about people and Islam, and about that part of the wold, those are the words you constantly have to use. To think past it, to go beyond it, not to use it, is virtually impossible, because there is no knowledge that isn't codified in this way about that part of the world." -Edward Said

(This Is Not Beirut)/There Was and There Was Not 
A video by Jayce Salloum  
49 minutes/ 1994

Summary: This Is Not Beirut is a personal project that examines the use and production of images and representations of Lebanon and Beirut, both in the West and in Lebanon itself. It also records Salloum's interactions and experiences while working in Lebanon, focusing on this representational process by a Westernized, foreign-born Lebanese mediator with cultural connections to and baggage from both the West and Lebanon. Salloum situates the tape between genres, looking from the inside out at each and critically engaging the assumptions involved, and thus broken, as sites for the construction and discovery of identity. Salloum collected more than 200 hours of Hi-8, VHS, and found film material in Lebanon during 1992. The project tries to make sense of the material and its acquisition-sometimes directly and at other times addressing the attempt itself-to produce works that frame relationships, sites, subjects, and practical and conceptual issues. 

'The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilization', Edward Said in Lecture
Executive Producer, Director & Editor Sut Jhally
Edited by Sanjay Talreja
40 minutes, 1998 Courtesy: Media Education Foundation

Summary: In this important lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts, Said takes aim at one of the central tenets of recent foreign policy thinking-- that conflicts between different and "clashing civilizations" (Western, Islamic, Confucian) characterize the contemporary world."The real question is whether in the end we want to work for civilizations that are separate, or whether we should be taking the more integrative, but perhaps more difficult path, which is to see them as making one vast whole, whose exact contours are impossible for any person to grasp, but whose certain existence we can intuit and feel and study." -Edward Said