Zineb Sedira
Les terres de mon père/ The Land of my Father (2016)
Country: Algeria
Is it legitimate to want to define the limits of a territory, or does this amount to removing them
from the only domain where they can become fulfilled: the interiority of the one who expresses
them, in this case her father? And if this is the case, how, in a respectful way, to map the notion
of territory? Every effort of spatialisation is, for her father, at once mental and physical. Walking,
her father traces out his land both mentally and physically. Experience plays a fundamental role
in the tracing of a territory. Zineb Sedira plays with this divide between ‘interiority’—the mental
apprehension of the world—and ‘physicality’—the physical materialisation of a territory. Is not
the notion of territory inseparable from the experience of the body? The two heterogeneous
notions of body and territory seem here, in the experience of her father, consubstantial with the
representation of land. A perception of territory at once precise and hazy emanates from such a
standpoint.
Kamal Aljafari
UNDR (2024)
Runtime: 15’
Country: Palestine
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human
interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play
hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated
incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial
surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.
Azzedine Saleck
Dune (2022)
Country: Mauritania
Runtime: 8’
“Above the land
Across the sand
The things I’ve seen
The ways I’ve been”
A conversation between Bah ould Saleck and Mohamedou ould Salahi, respectively the artist’s
father and a former Mauritanian detainee who spent 12 years in Guantanamo in the hands of
the CIA.
A dialogue between two Mauritanians about the time against the backdrop of images of a loads
of sand in the desert, suggests that possibly and despite human efforts the landscape escapes us
and cannot be conquered.
Saif Fradj, Esraa Elfeky
I’ve Known Rivers (2023)
Country: Tunisia
Runtime: 18’
“South of Ajdabya”, founded by Esraa Elfeky from Egypt and Saif Fradj from Tunisia, is a 2022
made collective of filmmakers interested in the north African desert, its mythologies, geologies,
and anthropology. Using a mix of old filmmaking techniques (analog) with digital drawings and
contemporary audio-visual effects, the collective aims to rewrite a common lost memory of the
North African region on which the subjective imagination interacts.
