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ON THE GROUND, FICTION IS REALITY: THREE SCI-FI FILMS BY LARISSA SANSOUR
2009-2019
Director
Larissa Sansour
Søren Lind
Starring
Larissa Sansour
Anna Aldridge
Leyla Ertosun
Pooneh Hajimohammadi
Hiam Abbass
Maisa Abd Elhadi
Marah Abu Srour
Runtime
62 MINUTES
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Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian-born artist whose films interrogate the creation of ‘fact’ often taking inspiration from popular media, particularly expressed through science fiction. In her own words:
“When I start working on a project I don’t lay a premise for its fiction. Somehow in my work elements of fiction emerge spontaneously, it is as though a complete picture is never there without the inclusion of fiction and I hope the viewer can also recognize the limited version of claimed myopic copies of reality. For me the latter is more of a fiction than the former. As fiction resides in the real, one can inversely see the real in fiction.”
This program will feature three of Sansour's sci-fi films A SPACE EXODUS, IN THE FUTURE and IN VITRO. In them, Sansour constructs realities that dialectically relate, mix, or entirely invent new Palestinian pasts, presents and futures out of memory, history and fiction. The typical western (American specifically) sci-fi music, landscapes, costumes are altered, decorated with a Palestinian flare, bringing the audience into a brand new aesthetic experience of the genre. Combined with at times poetic and at others intellectually stimulating dialogue, Sansour’s films are experienced like myths of the future.
"When you are constantly in a documentary, and portrayed as victims and the object of analysis, you realize the position of the analyzer actually has a lot of power," said Sansour. "I thought, I have the right to claim tools that are being used in filmmaking just as the rest of the world does. I want to raise awareness—that it's one thing to sympathize with the Palestinian people, but it's more beneficial to create facts from the ground."
A SPACE EXODUS
A SPACE EXODUS quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognizable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour's film.
The film follows the artist herself onto a phantasmagoric journey through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick's thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing Armstrong's moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as "a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind."
IN THE FUTURE WE ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN
IN THE FUTURE WE ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN, co-directed with Søren Lind, resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain—suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention—de facto creating a nation.
IN VITRO
Commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the 58th Venice Biennale, IN VITRO, also co-directed with Lind, is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film filmed in black and white.
“Set in Bethlehem, IN VITRO is a post apocalyptic film that takes place thirty years after an eco-disaster. In previous projects, I had been using science fiction to explore the concepts of collective and personal loss, cultural erasure, and the effects of trauma on the national psyche. The conceptual framework for the feature continued this line of research by accelerating the climate dystopia we are all currently facing, with a focus on the local factors further aggravating the ecological crisis in a Palestinian context.
As we started editing the script down for the film, it became clear that the most crucial aspects to explore were the psychological implications of this potentially complete erasure, a tabula rasa. What is left when everything vanishes? What part of the past do we rely on for survival? So, the script for IN VITRO was written as a dialogue between two scientists, a generation apart: one having seen the world before the apocalypse and the other being born in a bunker underneath the town she’s destined to rebuild, but that she’s never experienced firsthand. So the climate disaster eventually became a pretext for a debate about the effects of memory, nostalgia, and inherited trauma on personal and collective identity…
While the older scientist, Dunia, hopes to shape the future in the image of the past and relies on her memories and nostalgia, the younger scientist, Alia, rebels against this thought, suggesting that the very idea is flawed and relies on, as she says, a history reduced to reductive symbols and iconography, a future built on nostalgia.” - Larissa Sansour
“When I start working on a project I don’t lay a premise for its fiction. Somehow in my work elements of fiction emerge spontaneously, it is as though a complete picture is never there without the inclusion of fiction and I hope the viewer can also recognize the limited version of claimed myopic copies of reality. For me the latter is more of a fiction than the former. As fiction resides in the real, one can inversely see the real in fiction.”
This program will feature three of Sansour's sci-fi films A SPACE EXODUS, IN THE FUTURE and IN VITRO. In them, Sansour constructs realities that dialectically relate, mix, or entirely invent new Palestinian pasts, presents and futures out of memory, history and fiction. The typical western (American specifically) sci-fi music, landscapes, costumes are altered, decorated with a Palestinian flare, bringing the audience into a brand new aesthetic experience of the genre. Combined with at times poetic and at others intellectually stimulating dialogue, Sansour’s films are experienced like myths of the future.
"When you are constantly in a documentary, and portrayed as victims and the object of analysis, you realize the position of the analyzer actually has a lot of power," said Sansour. "I thought, I have the right to claim tools that are being used in filmmaking just as the rest of the world does. I want to raise awareness—that it's one thing to sympathize with the Palestinian people, but it's more beneficial to create facts from the ground."
A SPACE EXODUS
A SPACE EXODUS quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognizable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour's film.
The film follows the artist herself onto a phantasmagoric journey through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick's thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing Armstrong's moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as "a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind."
IN THE FUTURE WE ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN
IN THE FUTURE WE ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN, co-directed with Søren Lind, resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain—suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention—de facto creating a nation.
IN VITRO
Commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the 58th Venice Biennale, IN VITRO, also co-directed with Lind, is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film filmed in black and white.
“Set in Bethlehem, IN VITRO is a post apocalyptic film that takes place thirty years after an eco-disaster. In previous projects, I had been using science fiction to explore the concepts of collective and personal loss, cultural erasure, and the effects of trauma on the national psyche. The conceptual framework for the feature continued this line of research by accelerating the climate dystopia we are all currently facing, with a focus on the local factors further aggravating the ecological crisis in a Palestinian context.
As we started editing the script down for the film, it became clear that the most crucial aspects to explore were the psychological implications of this potentially complete erasure, a tabula rasa. What is left when everything vanishes? What part of the past do we rely on for survival? So, the script for IN VITRO was written as a dialogue between two scientists, a generation apart: one having seen the world before the apocalypse and the other being born in a bunker underneath the town she’s destined to rebuild, but that she’s never experienced firsthand. So the climate disaster eventually became a pretext for a debate about the effects of memory, nostalgia, and inherited trauma on personal and collective identity…
While the older scientist, Dunia, hopes to shape the future in the image of the past and relies on her memories and nostalgia, the younger scientist, Alia, rebels against this thought, suggesting that the very idea is flawed and relies on, as she says, a history reduced to reductive symbols and iconography, a future built on nostalgia.” - Larissa Sansour