Origin: Greece, Malta, Palestine | Documentary | Director: Basma al-Sharif | 13 minutes

---

When filmmaker Basma al-Sharif was prevented from visiting Palestine for quite some time, she taught herself self-hypnosis so she could be in multiple places at once. She shot this work while in a trance. The result is a hypnotic journey, captured on Super 8 film, to the ruins of Gaza—ruins both ancient and modern, because here modern civilization also lies in rubble.

The director playfully uses disorienting stroboscopic imagery, fractures light into yellow, blue and red, and lets multiple images tumble over one another. With lively, motile camerawork she captures scenes of Malta, Athens and the Gaza Strip—of a ferry, a horse running backwards, the sun, the earth, the rocks and the sky—accompanied in the background by bell chimes and sounds of the sea. Al sharif toys with the fallibility of memory and transcends all geographic boundaries.

Al-Sharif’s videos invoke a desire for a home that perhaps never existed. If she is not allowed to travel physically, then she will take that trip in the cinema; together with the viewer, she brings about a dreamlike shift in collective perceptions.

---

View trailer