Your film uses a wide range of materials to create a rich portrayal of a personal and collective story. I’d love to begin with the central figure of Amine: was he the starting point or the culmination of your research?
Amine is my father. The film focuses on his life within the sociopolitical and labor conditions of his generation of Palestinian refugees, how the personal is political, how the immaterial is material, and vice versa. A series of long, weekly video calls uncovered his story of double exile: from land and labor, from Palestine to Lebanon—where he found refuge from Zionist terror but no livelihood—and then to an offshore oil platform in the UAE. In linking the Zionist colonization of Palestine and oil extraction in the region, I learned how Amine’s ancestors, oil laborers from his native Haifa, blew up a BP pipeline in 1936.
Archival materials, like photos of the pipeline sabotage, converse with footage from Beirut and Palestine, with aerial photos and digital maps of the island of Zirku. Can you elaborate on your research and work with these images? How did you handle editing these different formats?
Images often function like aesthetic walls that hide underlying violence; my practice often seeps through and ruptures such images to trespass physical walls into inaccessible locations behind borders or private property. The island, for example, is a restricted “security zone” where cameras are prohibited. The film trespasses onto the island through images of it on Google Earth, a “nature preservation” documentary and a toxic oil work safety video, produced by the company. One way these images abstract and normalize extraction from land and labor is by absenting the human body, so it was important to weave them with Amine’s weary body and his most visceral relation to Haifa, Beirut, and the island—the sea; repetition, fluidity, and 16mm image materiality, in addition to the soundscape, hold the film in a single space, an exilic dream of resistance and return to Palestine.
In the film you build an intriguing palimpsest of words and stories, drawing from diverse textual sources from different times. Can you tell us more about these texts and how you arranged, mixied and resignified them?
Three texts explore labor from capitalist, existentialist and materialist perspectives: workers’ Google reviews of the island highlight labor as a liberal promise of capitalist exchange. German idealist Philip Schmidt’s poem evokes our existential alienation from land and labor. Palestinian militant thinker Ghassan Kanafani’s materialist analysis of the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine explores labor as a force of resistance.
Creative code then remixes these texts, collapsing time twice: the past looks to the present as the horrifying future and envisions the sacrifice necessary to stop the genocide that Zionism would begin in 1948 with the founding of Israel, continue to perpetuate, and intensify in Gaza today. The present also looks to the past as a potential future, where laborers blow up oil pipelines to stop the genocide in Palestine.
Interview by Margot Mecca
