Part of Rubble on Screen: The Cinema of Demolition and Destruction

Rather than engendering solidarity and empathy through the depiction of destruction of social and material Palestinian life in the present tense, Cynthia Madansky’s STILL LIFE chooses instead to take spectators on a tour of the Occupied Territories after the bulldozers have rumbled through and the bombs have fallen. Hanging its power on aftermath, STILL LIFE reaches instead for a set of festering implications and associations triggered via images, musical composition, and spoken questions. Like many of the other films in this series, NO OTHER LAND preserves in the visual archive what will likely be lost. Shot over the course of five years and by a collective of four directors from Palestine and Israel, NO OTHER LAND shocks in its immediacy and palpable danger as an SOS call from Masafer Yatta, a front line of the Palestinian struggle.

Preceded by:
Cynthia Madansky STILL LIFE 2004, 15 min, Super-8mm-to-digital. Sound design by Zeena Parkins.

Total running time: ca. 110 min.