Part of the NY Counter Film Festival
Deep Sleep by Basma Alsharif draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain. Restricted from visiting Gaza for a period, Alsharif practiced self-hypnosis in an attempt to locate herself in several places at once and filmed this work while in a trance state. Appearing in the video as her own double, dressed in all-white, she walks through unidentifiable ruins, holding a recording device. The artist points to various details in a scene, her finger filling the frame, urging us to take a closer look. The meditative shots coax the viewer into the rhythmic flow of the film where time and temporalities, borders and distinguishable geographies collapse into one another. Here, Gaza is called upon, reinvented through the lens of the artist’s personal relationship to Palestine. The film is what the artist calls an “invitation to move from the corporeal self to the cinema space in a collective act of bi-location that transcends the limits of geographical borders and plays with the fallibility of memory.”
Directed by Basma Al-Sharif - 2014 - 12 min
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.
Directed by Jumana Mana - 2018 - 64 min