Excavations and Displacements

The groundwork for the future is laid in past. Archeology links the two with new data that informs our present. Or like all information, may be manipulated to shape the events that follow, even to provide a “scientific” basis for geopolitical operations. These films examine the states of refugees, both as victims of information and from information itself in the form of inescapable modern communications. The program opens in the temporal displacement of the future, only to move through the all-too-current turmoils of the present moment, only to end in contemplation of the relics of the distant past.

FILMS

In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain |
28 min | Larissa Sansour | Palestine | 2015

Uniquely poised at the cross-section of sci-fi, archaeology and politics, the film explores the appropriation of scientific investigation to create a desired historical narrative. The story is radically inventive, but the relevance is all too real.

Quiet Zone | 14 min | Karl Lemieux & David Bryant | Canada | 2015

Sufferers from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity, who cannot bear the omnipresent waves and rays of communication — tv, wi-fi, cellular — become refugees from the whole of the modern world.

The Wind | 4 min | Lina Ghaibeh & May Ghaibeh | Syria | 2015

What does it mean to be abandoned by everything? Abandoned by your people, your country? Abandoning your home, your street, your city, your country? Abandoned by the world?

No Exit | 11 min | Mohanad Yaqubi | Palestine | 2014

Like many people of his generation, Ali has decided to run away from the hardships of war, but finds himself caught at a bus-stop between worlds.

The Digger | 24 min | Ali Cherri | UAE/Lebanon | 2015

Shot in the Sharjah desert, The Digger follows the everyday life of Sultan Zeib Khan, the Pakistani caretaker who has been guarding the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis for twenty years. A witness to the nation’s founding mythologies, Sultan preserves archeological ruins, keeping them from falling into ruin. In the midst of these empty graves that echo the vastness of the desert, the absence of corpses is more unsettling than their presence.

Followed by Q&As with directors in attendance