Perishable Idol
Spanish premiere.
Introduction and Q&A with Majid Al-Remaihi (filmmaker) and Antonio Miguel Arenas (film programmer).
An archaeologist originally from Falaika Island, off the coast of Kuwait City, returns to this place, which had been abandoned since the Gulf War. He embarks on a solitary journey through the ruins of the past and the ghosts that inhabit them to perform one final ritual.
An island that has had many names and inhabitants — Falaika or Ikarus, a refuge for Sumerians, Greeks, and Arabs. After 5,000 years of uninterrupted history, the flow of time was cut short in 1991 when the bombings of the Gulf War forced its evacuation. An archaeologist originally from the island, Hassan Al-Failakawy, returns for excavations and his encounter with the ruins sets in motion a journey through the site’s fractured genealogy. His return becomes an exploration of oblivion and legacy; of the scars of war and the survivals of the past. The multifaceted layers of time take shape in the form of an ancient deity that, from oblivion, asks for one last ritual gesture — to become an effigy in order to cease to exist. In a place where history seems to collapse and retreat into inert matter, memory is silenced as it becomes heritage — a picturesque and inexorably dead image. Majid Al-Remaih invites us into a cinematic microcosm where each frame opens a subtle crack in reality, through which the ghosts of the past and future appear and we vertiginously glimpse the end of a world —or of our ability to make sense of it in the present—.
Margot Mecca
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