The Greatest Waitest
Spring Grants 2020 - Production Stage
Razan AlSalah / Short Experimental or Essay / France, Canada, Palestine, Qatar / 2021 / 15 min / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: Politics, History, War, Creative Documentary
Synopsis
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 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 and Grantee. Her work has been exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries including Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, HotDocs, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, Blackstar Film Festival, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts & Sursock Museum. Razan teaches Moving Images and Intermedia at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.