Momentum, Momentum

These images were shot by my father in March 2001, during the Second Intifada, and they remained with me for years. When I was finally able to digitize my entire archive through a residency, I ended up watching four hours of footage repeatedly and from these four hours came Momentum. I kept returning to a question: what does it mean to watch unused images when these recordings are more than documents of a past event. They continue to circulate in the present, carrying memories, grief and frustration. The film became a way of entering into a dialogue with those images, with my father, and with my own position as someone who has been given both the archive and the responsibility that comes with it.

I was never interested in presenting the footage as untouched historical evidence. We often imagine archives as stable records of the past, but my relationship to these images is much more fragmented. The editing emerged from that tension. By freezing, repeating, accelerating, or interrupting the footage, I wanted to dialogue and create moments where viewers could look differently. Sometimes an image passes too quickly; slowing it down or suspending it allows us to stay with it. At other moments, the stuttering quality reflects the instability of the image, the way certain moments return obsessively while others remain inaccessible. The editing is not an attempt to restore the archive but rather to interrogate it, to make visible both what the images reveal and what they cannot fully contain.

Text has always been a part of my practice. I work with text, sound, and image as distinct and independent elements, and I tend to think of them as operating alongside one another rather than in a hierarchical relationship. So the absence of a voice-over in Momentum wasn’t so much a refusal as a continuation of how I usually work. In this film, text allowed me to be more tentative. I wasn’t interested in explaining the images or guiding the viewer through them. The text functions less as narration than as a series of thoughts, questions, and encounters with the archive. It creates a space for reflection rather than certainty. The painted interventions come from a similar place. They acknowledge that looking and not looking is never neutral. The paint simultaneously obscures and also reveals. It interrupts the image, but it also draws attention to it. For me, these gestures become a way of marking my presence in relation to my father’s footage, creating a conversation across time between the original recording and my contemporary engagement with it. They also emphasize that an archive is never fixed but rather something we continually return to, reinterpret, and activate.

The soundtrack was built around the idea of living within different temporalities. The original sounds recorded by my father carry the immediacy of the moment; they place us within the space of the recording itself. Preserving that exchange with the image was important to me. At the same time, I felt that the film needed another sonic layer. As with the text, sound became a way of interacting with the footage rather than simply accompanying it. The droning and atmospheric sounds create a sense of duration and tension that felt true to my experience of watching and rewatching these images, while also following the news and witnessing the ongoing realities they evoke, and the soundscape that existed then and now. They don’t illustrate the images so much as open a space around them. Throughout the film, sound becomes a way of moving between past and present. It allows the archive to remain rooted in its original moment while also resonating with continuing realities, creating a dialogue between the time of the recording and the time of viewing and interacting.