Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark: Fundraising Event @Lola Lieven by Asian Movie Night

check out our website for more information on the actual event and tickets: https://asianmovienight.com/Asian-Movie-Night-Unlearning-Maps

You are warmly invited to four days of listening, gathering, collective unlearning, and fundraising in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence. When genocide and war are narrated as inevitable, the language of justice is co-opted to justify imperial violence. This violence not only destroys lands and lives, but also captures the future, closes the horizon, and makes us believe there is no outside to the binaries imposed on us, no other possible future.

Solidarity, then, cannot mean simply choosing a side within the maps already given to us. Imperial powers, authoritarian governments, nationalist projects, media systems, and even oppositional narratives can all become entangled in reproducing domination and narrowing political imagination. The histories of marginalized peoples are often folded into these frameworks, but this does not delegitimize their struggles. It makes it more urgent to hold them carefully, and to build forms of relation, language, and solidarity that cannot be easily returned to imperial or authoritarian narratives.

This four-day gathering centers situated knowledge. Solidarity cannot flatten different struggles into one language. It must begin from where people stand, their histories, lands, wounds, survival, and limits of vision. Every community sees from somewhere. No position holds the full picture. Listening, then, is not distant sympathy, but a way of disturbing inherited maps. Across different histories and struggles, other geographies of resistance may become visible.

The program brings together documentary films, collective reading, performance, and a book launch, tracing histories and voices from Palestine, Rojava, Khuzestan, and Tehran. The films do not only reflect the present moment of crisis and conflict, but the longer historical formations and structural forces — displacement, ethnic marginalization, petro-capitalism, and the exclusions produced by national projects — that shaped these conditions and continue to shape them.

Harvesting

Througout the gathering, we introduce the practice of harvesting, a collective method of processing, witnessing, and responding to what we experience together.

Fundraising

Across Palestine, Rojava, Lebanon, Iran, and communities continue to live through war, displacement, militarization, censorship, economic violence, and the long afterlives of colonial and authoritarian projects. Yet even under these conditions, people continue to make worlds: through art, teaching, care, collective survival, memory, and resistance. The donations gathered through this program will travel to grassroots initiatives and communities whose struggles accompany this gathering. We do not understand donation as charity detached from relation. We understand it as a gesture of solidarity, however partial and insufficient: a way of refusing distance, and of remaining accountable to the lives, struggles, and futures that this gathering asks us to witness. If you are able to contribute, your support becomes part of the passage between here and there, between those who listen, those who remember, and those who continue to endure and create under conditions designed to make life impossible.

Each small candle lights a corner of the dark.