A year ago, Palestinian-British filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky delivered a lecture in Lafayette College’s Landis Cinema called “Death is Certain, But Not Final” — a “non-academic, irreverent performance lecture on absence as an essential creative and political component of radical / experimental documentary filmmaking.”
The lecture was revelatory, as Farouky led an engaged audience through a conjuring of artists dealing with absence, from American composer John Cage to Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, French filmmaker Marguerite Duras to Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Across the borders of nations and time, possibility emerged, and Farouky brilliantly led us through the portal he opened on the evening of Oct. 7, 2024.
Farouky was one of seven artists who visited Lafayette as part of the Palestinian Film Series. Over the past two years, we’ve showcased 20 different films from Palestinian filmmakers, and the series has brought together a growing audience of students, faculty, staff and community members across the Lehigh Valley to engage with films that illuminate myriad perspectives, forms and stories.
Produced from 1973 to the present, the films we’ve programmed refuse to reduce Palestinian cinema to a monolith, celebrating a vital cinematic tradition in the midst of escalating dehumanization that continues to have lethal, world-shattering consequences. For two years, Landis Cinema was a site of possibility, igniting an urgent dialogue that has been largely shut down across academia.
In his lecture, Farouky recalled an encounter with a former student, who asked him, “How do you make a film about something that isn’t there?” He responded, “In order to show absence in cinema, it’s necessary not simply to exclude something, but to show us the holes where something should be. This is the difference between nothing, and nothingness […] nothingness is the absence of something.”
A year after Farouky’s visit to campus, I’m again teaching the same documentary filmmaking course that he visited. But this time, on Oct. 7, 2025, I experienced the nothingness which Farouky unpacked for my students the year prior. Absent was the opportunity to gather with community members to watch two films committed to sharing the experience of Palestinian children: Khadijeh Habashneh’s “Children Without Childhood” and Mai Masri’s “Frontiers of Dreams and Fears”.
The scheduled screening that had been on the syllabus since its inception was erased — canceled at the request of Lafayette’s provost. Despite the series’ commitment to an urgent, liberatory politic of humanization for all, the films were reduced to the aforementioned monolith with this decision, unable to be seen or talked about on this day, a precedent I struggle to find anywhere else.
Most of the artists in Farouky’s talk have passed, so in many ways, he was staging a convening of ghosts a year ago. It was with this rumination in mind last week that I encountered the end result of an anonymous protest staged in a cinema that was empty on Tuesday night — images of Palestinian children, women, men and families printed out and taped to each seat in front of an empty screen. In the images, they are alive, smiling, holding cherished toys and loved ones; in the text is a description of their death from Israel’s relentless siege on Gaza.
Aligned with the spirit of Farouky’s words, this creative protest shows us the holes — the empty seats in the cinema and the many aching absences they represent.
Drew Swedberg is an adjunct professor of Film & Media Studies and a co-organizer of the Palestinian Film Series with his FAMS colleague, Professor Nandini Sikand.