Of Some Interruptions: Tending The Fire, Unsettling Our Practices, Refusing

with Léa Morin

The Ongoing Seminar #02

Thursday 28 May, 10.30am – 1.30pm

Friday 29 May, 3.30pm – 6.30pm

Casa do Comum — Rua da Rosa 285, Lisbon

“Pack up your equipment. It is useless.” These are the final words of Mostafa Derkaoui’s Of Some Meaningless Events (1974), spoken by Abdellatif, a fitter at the Port of Casablanca, to the socially engaged film crew that has come to film him. The question the film poses, whether the act of filming is not itself a depoliticisation of reality, resurfaces each time we attempt to reactivate it: through restoration, circulation, or archiving. How do we approach histories of cinema interrupted (by death, political engagement, invisibilisation) without absorbing them into the very frameworks they resisted? What remains of a revolutionary gesture once it enters the institution?

Drawing on film fragments, texts, photographs, and non-aligned accounts, researcher Léa Morin proposes a collective inquiry into the politics of refusal — and into what it might mean to tend to wounded cinematic histories without extinguishing what made them burn.

Léa Morin is a film curator and independent researcher. She is particularly interested in the circulation (across time and geography) of ideas, forms, aesthetics and political and artistic struggles. Grounded in a political and collective approach to archival work, she militates for the preservation of fragile cinematic archives—suppressed, unfinished, or non-aligned cinemas. She is active in several collectives, including the Bouanani Archives: A History of Cinema in Morocco (Rabat), Talitha, an association engaged in the re-circulation of experimental cinematic and sound archives (Rennes), the editorial project Intilak, and the Research Department of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian).

—

The Ongoing Seminar is a series of encounters in Lisbon dedicated to critical thinking and collective reflection on the role of cinema in the present, the relationship between images and politics, and the emancipatory potential of documentary practices.

Co-organised by Doc’s Kingdom and IFILNOVA/CineLab, this encounter is free and open to everyone. As places are limited, registration is mandatory by sending an email to: phildoc@fcsh.unl.pt.

Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the project UID/00183/2025.