Origin: Unknown | Documentary | Director: Till Roeskens | 46 minutes

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Videomappings: Aida, Palestine

Till Roeskens 2009 docu 46 min.

Till Roeskens employs an ingenious device to lend these oral testimonies by refugees in the Aida camp of the West Bank a striking visual dimension.
On screen: nothing but another screen. At first untouched, a blank sheet of paper is slowly filled with lines. Then these lines grow, push and cross each other, to finally form a drawing, a layout. They unfold a topography, mark places, build houses, give directions, describe tangles of roads and obstacles. In essence, they are laying down "flat biographies".
Six sheets slowly come to life in this way, following the rhythms of stories told by children, women or men, people we never get to see. Where are these voices?
Behind the sheets. Of course, but where else? Exile, mourning, divided space, it all creates a slowmotion animation, the visible testimony of an experience whose protagonists are de facto concealed: leaving only voices and scribbled signs.
(Text adapted from Nicolas Féodoroff, FID Marseille).

Somewhere, in the middle of a tangle of borders: a refugee camp. People caught in a situation that becomes more absurd every day. Just trying to live a human life. With courage, with craftiness, with humour too. We don't see their faces. We don't see the places they talk about. Yet we are projected closely into their intimate experience of the world, while following line by line the maps they are drawing to represent the complexity of the spaces around them.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/25189174
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztd4hdhp3s

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View trailer