Center for Human Rights and the Arts Presents

Film Screening: Unravel by Mona Benyamin

Unravel is the artistic component of Mona Benyamin's hybrid thesis project for the MA in Human Rights and the Arts. The film explores repetition and return as intertwined material and psychological forces shaping the Palestinian experience. It features two synchronized videos bound by a shared soundtrack—a choral adaptation of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. In the first video, horror cinema tropes structure a narrative featuring the artist’s parents, a senior Palestinian couple living under occupation, who are chased by an unidentified voyeur up the stairwell of their home. The second video documents a choir performing a reworked Boléro that modulates and grows in intensity. Voices replace the traditional instrumental original of the notoriously repetitive piece, singing variations of “ah”, which alludes to the tradition of Ahaat, an Arabic vocal technique that conveys affirmation, sorrow, longing and exhaustion. Across both videos, repetition shifts from a stabilizing force into a source of anxiety, transforming familiarity into disorientation and revealing its oppressive potential. This work forms part of a broader research project examining the relationship between musical repetition and subjection, and music’s capacity to produce both constructive and destructive affects.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Preston Theater

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