CN: Thematization of violence
The polyphony of natural and human-made destruction evokes questions regarding sovereignty, erasure, and the haunting persistence of place. The skies above us, like the landscapes below us, witness and participate in the reconfigurations of history and culture. UNDR and THE DIARY OF A SKY explore how space is appropriated, contested, and transformed. The films trace the spectral relationship between human agency and environmental rupture, confronting the politics of occupation and belonging to the land while offering a meditation on its materiality as a repository of memory and conflict. (Boris Hadžija)
The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands of years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
THE DIARY OF A SKY unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, revealing the haunting fusion of incessant Israeli military flights and the hum of generators during blackouts. This 45-minute video essay plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponization of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Lawrence Abu Hamdan
