The origins of the film seem to lie in the discovery, around a decade ago, of a collection of family archives that had belonged to your paternal grandmother. How did the project develop from that initial finding?
Before starting this project, I had already worked from the Palestinian perspective. I lived there in 2012, worked with some NGOs in Bethlehem and Ramallah, and later created an art project that was exhibited in Chile and Palestine years later. Back then, I focused on addressing the occupation from different angles, including the perspective of the Chilean-Palestinian community (we are more than half a million descendants of Palestinians). At that time, I made a video, an artist’s book, a photographic work, and drawings.
So, when I came across this archival material from my paternal Jewish grandmother in 2017, I already had a fairly deep understanding of Palestine, but it motivated me to investigate the Jewish-Israeli narrative from the inside, to think critically about the idea of Zionism. On one hand, I wanted to understand the motivations behind my family’s migration to Israel (which had always seemed like a very strange and uncomfortable thing to me) and also their return, largely motivated by a disillusionment with what Israel was in practice.
This material—which was also very extensive and took me a long time to review—was a sort of cursed inheritance, because I felt the need to delve into something that had clearly been a taboo in my house. Something that was complex to talk about, not only because my father never spoke of it, but because my mother is deeply committed to the Palestinian cause. I also want to point out that this was before October 2023; at that time, it was complex to criticise Israel without being labeled as antisemitic, so it was a challenge to initially articulate the project without falling into clichés. All of this complexity motivated me to create an art project that eventually, after several years, turned into a film.
The film intertwines the history of your paternal family of Jewish tradition and your maternal family of Palestinian origin, bringing together family memories and voices through your journey in search of Az Zeeb, the village from which your maternal great-grandfather originated. How did you approach bringing these two narrative strands together and finding a balance between them?
As I mentioned before, my research for the film began with the discovery of Super 8 footage and various archival materials (Hebrew translation notebooks, slides, legal and religious documents, etc.) related to my paternal family and their subsequent emigration to Israel from Chile in 1970. Since I had already worked on Palestinian history, it felt both interesting and complex to delve into the Jewish side. The project started out almost 100% focused on that perspective. However, as I developed it, it became impossible to avoid addressing the counter-history of my other family; in a way, they were two sides that inevitably connect and influence one another.
In addition to that, midway through the creative process, I met an uncle from my Palestinian family. He belonged to the side that stayed behind—part of my family who were refugees in Lebanon with whom we had lost touch. His story created parallels with my father’s history in the military, connections that I found very intriguing to explore. In an indirect way, the migration of my paternal family makes them complicit in the expulsion of my maternal family.
The trajectory of the film is directly related to how the process of making it unfolded. First, I entered through these archives into my paternal side, but inevitably, they ended up crossing into the history of my maternal family. There was never a conscious effort to balance things out or create a false equivalence; it just happened naturally, and I feel the film itself demanded it. That is why I feel the film was a very alive process of exploration—there was no script, but rather pieces that kept appearing and shaping the journey. I didn’t even know about the village when I started the film.
The film is shot almost entirely on Super 8, at times making the boundary between archival materials and contemporary footage nearly imperceptible. Could you tell us more about this formal choice?
When I saw that material in 2017, I happened to be traveling to exhibit my work in Palestine, and at that moment, without thinking about it too much, I decided to shoot in the same format. I wanted to take advantage of the trip and film whatever I could there—the places tied to my father, but also the ones I was discovering myself in the West Bank. I wanted to create a counterpoint to the images I had seen of my father. I had never shot on analog film before, only analog photography. I was fascinated by how it turned out and decided to keep filming in Chile using that format. Super 8 allows for something spontaneous, fresher, and more erratic, which interests me deeply—like a journal or a notebook of sketches.
Using the Super 8 format to bridge all the material—between the images of the past and the present—allowed me to speak of parallels where I saw connections, both temporal and geographical. I felt there were similar processes, parallel ideals, political repressions in both territories, and landscapes that repeated themselves: the desert, the valleys. I feel many similarities. On the other hand, there is always an ambiguity in time, a certain confusion, and that opens up a possibility to reflect on the present or on the temporality of things, on the cyclical nature of historical processes, and also on potential ruptures.
A few sequences shot digitally stand out as exceptions, including the moment when you reach the entrance to Az Zeeb and speak about it with your parents. What led you to make this choice?
The film initially included several digitally shot scenes. Little by little, they started to feel redundant, and I became interested in making the film almost exclusively in Super 8, except for three very precise and short moments. These three felt symbolic to me, in addition to providing a pause and a way to pull back the curtain—to look behind the cloudiness of the Super 8, behind that more ethereal and timeless quality. In a way, they allow you to encounter something very raw underneath, very harsh and real. In this case, the houses and my parents. They act as a reality check, or as we say in Chile, they “despabilan” (shake up) the flow a bit, bringing you back down to earth. This is especially true for the final digital scene, where something very spontaneous and real happens—something that Ana Edwards, the editor, and I felt we couldn’t “hide” behind the archival footage, that needed to be looked at head-on.
On the soundtrack, voices and sounds are often dissociated from the images, creating a persistent sense of displacement. Could you comment on this aspect of the film?
I was very interested in making a film using personal archives rather than what one might call “official” institutional archives (with the exception of the propaganda archive that belonged to my grandmother). I was interested in the shaky and unpredictable nature of handheld Super 8 film, free from the pretensions of a formal archive, and how we can glimpse that specific reality through the eyes of my grandparents, my uncle, or my father. I didn’t want images that felt like “oh, I’ve already seen this,” or historical footage pulled from common public archives. In that sense, accompanying the voices presented a major challenge. It forced me to avoid being purely illustrative with what was being heard.
While the voiceover is at times more narrative and linear, the image occasionally breaks apart, which I think invites the viewer to piece together elements that often don’t seem to have much to do with one another—a game I like to propose. In that regard, the narrative is more open, more challenging, but more interactive. In some way, I was also interested in that more spectral quality of Super 8, which for me relates to how we construct our own history: based on memories and somewhat erratic images, far removed from a highly solid, closed historical truth.
Staying with the film’s sonic dimension, could you tell us how you selected the music that accompanies certain moments in the film?
I worked on the music with a Chilean friend of Jewish origin, Ian Jakab, who went through a similar experience to my paternal family’s. He migrated to Israel as a teenager and ultimately ended up escaping the country, renouncing the military, disillusioned with Israel and the ideal that had led him there.
He is a musician who works extensively with vinyl archives, mixing and distorting them. He has a major vinyl collection, and several of those records became the foundation for the sounds and melodies that appear. In addition to his collection, I contributed from my own family collection; many of the elements came from my families’ cassettes and vinyls. What you hear is almost entirely archival material, either in its original condition or manipulated.
I was never interested in over-illustrating or having the music be too central, but I did feel it was important for creating certain atmospheres and transporting the viewer to different temporalities. I used three songs without any manipulation: one is by a 1970s Chilean-Jewish women’s group that embodies the naive, utopian dream of Israel; another is more Zionist and promotional in nature; and finally, a Palestinian song of struggle and resistance. This last one was provided by the Majazz Project, a very interesting initiative dedicated to rescuing and archiving Palestinian music.
The film concludes with the telling of a somewhat enigmatic fable that your great-grandfather once told your mother. How would you suggest interpreting it?
For me, it represents the possibility of imagining. Beyond the horror, we will always have something greater within us, and I prefer to hold onto that possibility. It is the power of imagination that, for me, is present in that story.
My mother interprets it as the possibility that there is always a universe within the smallest thing—if you look closely at the most minute detail, there is another contained universe. In a way it is similar, though perhaps from a more physics-based perspective, such as in quantum physics.
It also takes on a special meaning for me because it is my great-grandfather’s voice that appears to close the film. It is an example of his universe, of his oral tradition, which is so vital in the Arab world. And it is also the possibility of resistance when there is nothing left, when everything has been taken from you. It is like my uncle says in the film: only memory remains, in this case transmitted through the spoken word. While my father’s side is full of archives and images, on my mother’s side, what resists is the word, the emotion, and the experience passed down through generations.
Interviewed by Marco Cipollini
