Documentary, 51m

In 1963 Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet and filmmaker, ex-catholic and communist, went looking for signs of the divine in the villages, churches, and deserts of Palestine. He was at the same time searching the faces of its inhabitants for traces of the rustic piety that produced the Christian revolution, all the while recording his travels in a documentary of locations and scenarios for his planned film on the life of Jesus. Having found too few places untouched by the violence of modernity, Pasolini instead shot his Gospel According to Matthew in southern Italy.
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In a stuttering embrace of the holy fatherland and father Pasolini himself, Pasolini Pa* Palestine remakes Pasolini’s documentary, translating his script into Arabic and taking his film survey as a map for exploring contemporary Palestine. Reactivating Pasolini’s pursuit of the ‘archaic’ and the ‘sub-proletarian’ in a landscape cluttered with the markers of modern/colonial war and occupation, the video weaves together myth and document, the theological and the political, the messianic and the everyday.
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At once an exploration of artistic repetition and reenactment, and the scenario of production that lies at the margins of epic narrative, Pasolini Pa* Palestine is also a discerning investigation of the past as a motivating political force, revolutionary and otherwise, in the wreckage of the modern.

Director: Ayreen Anastas