Vikalp @ Prithvi + Q & A with CAMP
May 28, 2021 - May 30, 2021
Jerusalem/Al Quds
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar
The Neighbour before the House
(60 mins)
2009-2011
Arabic and English with English Subtitles.
A film by CAMP
(Directed by Shaina Anand with Ashok Sukumaran, Shereen Barakat, Nida Ghouse, Mahmoud Jiddah, Mahasen Nasser Eldin, and Aarthi Parthasarathy)
Eight Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Beit Hanina and the Old City use their TV screens to look out into their neighbourhood, via a CCTV camera mounted on the rooftops of their homes, "tripods made of stones". Instead of bearing witness in the usual way, these families control the cameras from their homes; inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire and doubt pervades the project of watching. Sometimes the voice looks for an image, at other times image provokes voice, or they separate into distant landscapes and innermost thoughts, as Palestinian residents of the Old City and East Jerusalem evaluate occupation and the nature of their distance from others.
It was filmed in October 2009 in Al Quds/Jerusalem using a cheap Pan-Tilt-Zoom CCTV camera. At the time of filming, there were escalations in the Al Aqsa compound in the Old City. 28 Palestinian families who had been living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem had been served eviction notices, three families, including the Al Kurd, Al Hanoon and Al Ghawi families had been evicted a few months ago. In the hilly neighbourhood of Silwan 88 houses were to go, to make way for the City of David theme park. And at the boundaries of Greater Jerusalem, in Bethany and Abu Dis, gerrymandering by way of the separation wall had thrown many Palestinian residents of Jerusalem into the West Bank. The testimonies of the eight families narrated over the landscape that they are filming live bring us a first-hand, visceral documentation of this city and its various neighbourhoods that are at the flashpoint of the uprising today.
The footage was edited into this feature-length film in 2011.
- https://studio.camp/works/aljaar/
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- https://www.moderntimes.review/staying-with-the-trouble-the-radical-work-of-camp/
