← Close Project Centre Montréalais du Cinéma Palestinien
[Montreal Center for Palestinian Film]

McGill University
ARCH 304 
Group project
2023


The Centre montréalais du cinéma palestinien brings together film, archival research, public gathering, and collective memory within an existing building in Montréal. The project asks how an archive can be protected without becoming hidden: not as a sealed collection, but as a living resource made accessible through screening, research, conversation, and public occupation.






























































Screening ephemera for Looted and Hidden: Palestinian Archives in Israel.



Developed through research into Palestinian films and archives that have been displaced or made inaccessible, the project treats projection as both a cultural practice and an architectural strategy. Film is not confined to the theatre. Images move onto translucent walls, across circulation spaces, and through the building’s exterior envelope, allowing the archive to enter the public realm.
































The programme brings together a theatre, archival storage, consultation spaces, an open archive, staff areas, flexible public rooms, and gardens. Rather than separating these functions into isolated zones, the project arranges them around overlapping spaces for viewing, researching, gathering, and exchange.

Projection fields extend between rooms and across circulation, connecting the private work of archival preservation with the public experience of film.
The project adapts and extends an existing building near the intersection of Rue Saint-Hubert and Boulevard Rosemont.
First- and second-floor plans showing the relationship between the archive, theatre, gardens, public spaces, and fields of projection.
Polycarbonate envelope and movable-wall assembly.















Polycarbonate operates simultaneously as enclosure, filter, and projection surface. Crystal and opal finishes establish different degrees of transparency, while a movable-wall system allows spaces to be reconfigured for screenings, exhibitions, consultation, and gathering.

Projected images are therefore never fixed to a single screen. They pass across layers of structure and occupation, alternately revealing, obscuring, and fragmenting what is being shown.


At night, the centre’s translucent surfaces allow films to register beyond the rooms in which they are shown. Images become visible from the street, garden, terrace, and interior circulation.

The ribbed envelope interrupts each projection, producing partial views rather than one complete image. Through overlap, movement, and fragmentation, the archive becomes present throughout the building and in the surrounding city.











Projection tests on the physical model explore how moving images and subtitle fragments are transmitted, interrupted, and reframed by the architecture. The tests informed the density, transparency, and placement of the building’s layered screening surfaces.



























































← Close Project
 Centre Montréalais du Cinéma Palestinien
[Montreal Center for Palestinian Film]
McGill University
ARCH 304 
Montreal, Quebec
2023

Instructor:  Cameron Cummings & Ella den Elzen
Team members: Sarah Kayed,  Grace Kong,  Yvana Martinez