Doha Film Institute
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Zei finds herself trapped in cyberspace in an impossible, yet eternal return to Palestine. Disembodied by the virtual, she interconnects Haifa, Beirut and Montreal in the 1940s, 1990s and 2020s. Returning home to her body, Zei discovers a new way of existing in the world.
Zei loses her body in cyberspace and finds herself trapped in a city that bears an uncanny resemblance to her grandparents’ home but denies they ever existed. She floats in photorealistic locations she cannot enter and navigates through an immersive depth that denies her senses. Only when Zei begins to witness the injustice of her own entrapment, does she regain physical sensation. Excavating her own inherited and living memory of exile pixelates the panoramic image of Haifa to a glitchy 3D triptych city, a collage of the many places Zei lives between today. Zei moves in place again, with a new understanding of how to inhabit space—shifting from gazing at the world to being in the world. Her exile transforms from a national identity to a political commitment to decolonize this place, wherever that may be.

Credits

Director
Razan AlSalah
Screenwriter
Razan AlSalah
Producer
Emilie Dudognon for IDA.IDA & Ghassan Fayad for Kng-Fu

About the Director

Razan AlSalah
Razan AlSalah works across a range of image, text and installation practices investigating the politics of dis/appearance of places and bodies in colonial image worlds—photographic, digital, virtual—breaking these thresholds of view into elsewheres here—where colonialism no longer makes sense. She is a 2020 Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) Grantee and Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow an
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