THE SUN AND THE LOOKING GLASS
for one easily forgets but the tree remembers
- TRAILER -
23 minutes | 2020
Palestine + Belgium
DCP | super 8, 35mm, HD video, stereo
no spoken dialogues, poems in English
- SYNOPSIS -
On a land perpetually threatened by colonial appropriation, the transmission of history and narratives plays a peculiar and vital role. The Sun and the Looking Glass - for one easily forgets but the tree remembers is an essay-film which paints a portrait of a place on a hill above Ein Qiniya, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, with two houses from the late Ottoman period. Looking at the objects uncovered during their renovations through a magnifying lens, the film performs the creation of narratives, through dynamic processes of revelation and disappearance.
- SCREENING HISTORY -
2020
FID INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL MARSEILLE, Marseille
PALESTINE CINEMA DAYS, Ramallah
BOSTON PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL, Boston
LA PLATA INTERNATIONAL INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL Buenos Aires
2021
REEL PALESTINE, Dubai
- CREDITS -
directed by Milena Desse
cinematography: Mashal Kawasmi and Milena Desse
sound recording: Montaser Abu Alul, Chloe Despax and Sylvie Bouteiller
editing: Milena Desse
sound design and mixing: Sylvie Bouteiller
developped in the frame of a residency at
Sakiya - Art Science Agriculture Ein Qiniya, Palestine
produced by Milena Desse
consulting producer: Mohanad Yaqubi
with the support of
WBI - Wallonie-Bruxelles International
KASK - De Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent
Idioms Film
Labokube
- PRESS ARTICLES -
FROM SCRATCH TO SCRATCH
interview by curator Sofia Marques, May 2020
“Words and language are human constructions, subjected to time, to translations and borrowings from diverse origins, and to transformations through new usage and contexts. They are revealed or erased, remembered or forgotten, somehow awaiting to be inhabited – like the shadow casted by the tree.”
read the full interview online
SENSES OF CINEMA
review by Leonardo Goi, October 2020
“A gradual peeling and uncovering of the many histories sedimented below those inanimate objects.This is, in a fundamental sense, an archaeology of memory, a call to scrutinise which stories get to be told, and which ones are buried (echoed by Desse’s choice to return, time and again, to the same magnifying glass as an instrument to zoom in on the landscape’s minutiae, and flip around one’s perspective).”
FID MARSEILLE
interview by Nicolas Feodoroff, July 2020
“The displaced narrative perspective, from the source of its articulation, forces us to look at this region’s History, and the conflict from a different angle: mineral, vegetal and animal. The traces adding up on the ground act upon it, leaving further traces; and the land, like the surface of photosensitive film, is seen as a basis for inscription, both vector and receptor of narratives.”
read the full interview online
BOSTON PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL
interview by Christine Giraud, October 2020
“I was interested in seeing how these elements—the stones, the trees, the sun— could actually be witnesses and how I could lend them voices in order to reveal the story of the place.”
read the full interview online
