double bill #21

Some journeys start with hope, only to be stormed by forces that seek to contain them. These films trace when freedom is delayed—yet endures.

Old Child unfolds in fragments, a stream of dreams and recollections through which Hazem, exiled from Gaza, tries to piece together a life scattered by displacement. Elettra Bisogno and Hazem Alqaddi find beauty in flashes—half-remembered gestures, lost landscapes—held together by an urge to find coherence where war has left only rupture.

In The Stopover, Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh set out to share their film abroad, only to be swallowed by the machinery of suspicion during a layover in Angola. What begins as routine travel descends into unlawful detention, their testimony laid bare against tranquil images of drifting clouds—freedom glimpsed but withheld.

Together, these works reveal how borders carve themselves into the psyche, and how the act of remembering—and of bearing witness—becomes its own form of resistance.