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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).”

 

read the full article online

 

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

 
 
 
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