Into the European Mirror is Julian Samuel's documentary investigation into the politics and poetics of frontiers. In this work, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492 is connected to the resistance of Palestinians in 1993. A politics of purposeful forgetting is explored: speakers ranging from Homi Bhabha (author of Nation and Narration), Chris Gilannou (A Doctor's Story of Life and Death in Beirut), Thierry Hentsch (Imagining the Middle East), and Rana Kabbani (Letter to Christendom) discuss ways the West, beginning with the Renaissance, has conceptualized modern civilization, eclipsing the enormous impact of the Arab-Muslim civilization during the Middle Ages. Similarly, the nation of Israel is discussed as predicated on the Balfour Agreement which ignores the rights of Arabs. Consisting almost entirely of interwoven interviews, Samuel's film constructs an alternative mirror by which relations between the Middle East and the West can be examined. (56 mins)

Preceded by Le Regard (Yasmina Bouziane, (Morocco, 1993, 12 mins, In Arabic, French, English with English subtitles), which explores the traditional view of an Arab woman, walking with downcast eyes; Signal (Pia Reunala, West Bank/France) 1994, 3 mins), which simply and eloquently presents absence in relation to Palestine; and Ala-DalOna (Caravan Mix) (Amer Ghandour, Lebanon, 1996, 5.5 mins), a techno-romp through the streets of Beirut. -Kathy Geritz