On Friday, February 27, TILT-SHIFT welcomes Yasmine Benabdallah for a screening and discussion of four of her films. These will be accompanied by a screening of Nour Ouyada's VERS LE SOLEIL, followed by a discussion of Benabdallah's political work and creative practice.

Born and raised in Morocco, Yasmine Benabdallah is a filmmaker, mixed-media artist, and researcher, whose work explores memory, performance, diaspora, archives, rituals, and time travel. Her work is experiential and grows through wandering and listening to bodies and spaces. Her films and installations have been shown in Morocco, France, Egypt, Canada, Palestine, Tunisia, Brazil, Germany, Lebanon, Portugal, the US, Scotland, England, and the UAE, where “How to reverse a spell: the promise of an archive” won the Sharjah Art Foundation Best Experimental Short Award. Yasmine has done residencies in Palestine, Morocco, France, Portugal, and Tunisia, where “Chebba” received the Cinephilia Best Screenplay Award at the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC).

murmurs (2025) is a silent video work made of still analog images of colonial Portuguese and Brazilian archives, the subtitles sutured excerpts from my research journal: an attempt to speak to the ghostly and muffled voices of the archive. Against archives’ architecture of power, water infiltrates the buildings, and the silenced voices seep through the fissures, an embodied response to archival fixity.

Visions of a dreamt sunset (2023) brings together images of landscapes in Tangier, archive, posters from 1950s American films, my hands trying to save film from drowning, sounds of the water meeting my voice. A travelogue about a fragmented self and Tangier, a city with a different colonial past. I stare at the ocean, hoping it can help us reconnect. I seek refuge in dreams of a sunset. I look for answers in the colonial film legacy of the city, hoping to reverse the spell and invite healing.

How to reverse a spell (2022) is a speculative triptych that traverses the disappearance and erasure of the Moroccan public archives and their colonial displacement. Frames waiting for their images, videos once stolen of a colonized people, a solar flare waiting to happen for everything to be restituted. The film is a call for access to our archives and their restitution from past colonizers, attempting, through the fabric of internet and lo-fi images, to reverse the colonial spell and make the videos appear again. Not asking for the right to use these images that were once stolen and smuggling them instead is an act of refusal and an act of return.

In Objets-Relais (2022), middle schoolers touch and take objects in their hands. The objects are their grandparents’, and in this act of touch, they take hold of their histories and heritage. Through 3D scanning and images that reflect, in their imperfections, the diluted memories that were passed on, the teenagers initiate the reappropriation of the objects and the stories they carry.

VERS LE SOLEIL (2019): You are now in the main hall of the National Museum in Beirut. A guard reminds you that you are encouraged to touch the archeological objects. A voice in your headset suggests that you lick the stone. You are now facing a hole in the wall on the lower left corner of a mosaic. The voice in your headset indicates that it was made by a sniper. Out of curiosity, you dial 1-9-9-1 to listen to the rest of the story (Nour Ouyada).

TILT-SHIFT, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work engages lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle. Curated by UCSC Film and Digital Media PhD. student alex cruse, this series connects conversations about aesthetics and form to work being done on the ground.