Screening

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, in collaboration with the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at The New School, is pleased to present the New York premiere of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s film A Thousand and One Jewels — ألف حليّة وحليّة. Introduced by Carin Kuoni, the screening is followed by a conversation with Azoulay and singer and artist Laura Elkeslassy, who is featured in the film, moderated by Ann Laura Stoler.

A Thousand and One Jewels (1’58”, 2026) is the concluding film of Azoulay’s trilogy Unlearning Imperial Plunder (following Un-Documented & The World Like A Jewel In The Hand). 

It is the story of jewels and their guardians, both living remnants of the once-thriving Jewish Muslim world in North Africa. Scattered throughout the film, the jewels speak to a precolonial world that refuses to disappear and resists the colonial violence that has separated Jews and Muslims. By sharing these stories and engaging in the making of the jewelry together, the film’s protagonists renew a truncated transmission of knowledge and know-how, thus suspending the museum verdict that, through looted objects, seals the history of this Jewish Muslim world and relegates it to a historical past.

Conceived as a necklace of tales, the film intertwines a plurality of voices with the lines of the Kol Nidrei prayer, which traditionally opens Yom Kippur services. Like a golden thread, the prayer runs through the film, revoking false promises as it resurrects the anticolonial imaginary of the ummah, the community of believers that is also the subject of Azoulay’s latest publication, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso 2025).