The anger and hate in the War on Palestine is noisy and grating. Whomever can shoot and kill becomes the winner. Of course, cultural eradication is the biggest victory and one senses in Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy (of shorts) Palestinian culture survives and quietly and effectively makes its point without resorting to RPGs.
Can you imagine the first Palestinian to walk on the moon? Well you can see that in “A Space Exodus” (2008). Given the difficulty in a Palestinian leaving Gaza through two very restrictive bureaucratic and politically controlled border crossings and the fact Gaza City has no airport the thought of a Palestinian walking on the moon is absurd. But absurdity can often be a simplistic and humorous way of making a point. “A small step for Palestine, a giant leap for mankind.” References to Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey” are front and centre and the recognizable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of the Sansour film.
“Nation Estate” (2012) reveals a Palestine state contained within an office tower with each floor opening to a town, or crucial Palestinian bureaucratic or architectural site. The office tower is enclosed by a cement wall. Love that poster in the elevator “Gaza Sushi: Best Sushi on the Block”. Is Sansour messaging us that Palestine is not a state but an “estate” within Israel?
In “In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain” (2015) a resistance leader muses over the death of her younger sister killed by “them” often constrained by a straitjacket as a narrative terrorist. The legitimacy of Israel as a state is challenged by the resistance leader stating at some point the death of a single person is not about the single life lost but rather the Palestine people as a whole that qualify them as targets. Then there are “those descendants claiming land of their fictional ancestors”. A forceful statement quietly made.
Your best chance of seeing these shorts would be in a documentary film festival.
All shorts were directed by filmmaker Sansour who has approximated the nature, reality and complexity of life in Palestine and the Middle East to visual forms normally associated with entertainment and televised pastime and her grandiose and often humorous schemes clash with the gravity expected from works commenting on the region. You can watch the trailer of “A Space Exodus” here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YhTUtC6SI&t=1s
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