The Cinematheque

“[A Magical Substance Flows into Me] is sketched in epic proportions and restrained style … Manna’s work reminds us we still have nature, history, and human desire, and the many stories they tell about the possibilities of resilience.”

Media Farzin, Frieze

Jumana Manna’s brilliantly structured nonfiction feature is a clear path through the mazelike boundaries of the past. At first, the 1930s radio work of German ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann appears to be Manna’s blueprint. Lachmann, intrigued by the many cultures in what he called Palestine’s ​“neutral background,” recorded a series of programs, each focused on a branch of local or Indigenous music. Manna retraces his steps, meeting Arabs, Kurds, Moroccans, Bedouin, and Yemenite Jews, presenting them with Lachmann’s recordings, then staging a current rendition. The talent of the artists and the erudition of each group’s knowledge keepers are on open display, but it’s Manna’s editing across unsettled time that sets this work apart. Manna knows that culture is often a vanguard of illusionism and imperialism; her intervention, an act of repatriation and preservation, is staked on specifics, and moulded to defy any assumptions about the limits of Palestinian memory.

In English, Arabic, and Hebrew with English subtitles

“While almost always premised on extensive research, Manna’s work never feels leaden, instead operating within a remarkably deft and contemporary framework that employs cinematic means to challenge established orders.”

Jesse Cumming, Cinema Scope

“Manna does more than reflect on the limits of the Orientalist archive … She creates an alternative historical narrative that bypasses the national, religious, and ethnic divisions that national archives carefully guard and constitute.”

Gil Hochberg, author of Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future