Join us for this full-day program around archival, editing, and documentary practices for filmmakers and artists working with found footage and archival material and those who are interested in working with hybrid essayistic forms. ‍ Our two facilitators, Lebanese editor and video artist Deena Charara, and experimental filmmaker and archivist Chantal Partamian, will share conceptual frameworks and propose technical approaches to editing archival images in the context of film and video art. The session will further situate archival mediation, media excavation, and “digital sculpting” as decolonial practices. Partamian’s work focuses on experimental editing techniques to create short projects and video capsules from a pre-existing archive. She will share practices of reassembling fragments of everyday life, intimate gestures, and landscapes into new narratives that challenge and enrich our understanding of the MENA/SWANA region using existing footage shot on Super 8mm and 16mm cameras in towns and villages across the eastern Mediterranean from the 1920s to the 1970s, which comprise Partamian’s Katsakh Mediterranean Archives, through the lens of personal and collective memory. Deena will shed light on the practice of “emotional editing” — where narrative is shaped not from scripts or continuity, but from fragments and coincidences. She will share how emotion and intuition can guide structure, rhythm, and meaning in the editing process. What Deena refers to as a process of creative excavation: finding story beats, listening for rhythm, and searching through images and sounds until an emotional truth emerges. Through film excerpts, live demonstration, and collective reflection, participants will be invited to experience editing as both a craft and a philosophy: a way of shaping memory, identity, and imagination through the fragments we carry. The program will include a lunch break and will end with an open discussion between the participants and both artists.