We Began by Measuring Distance

In an age of disinformation, the exact number of kilometres between two locations might seem like refreshingly straightforward data. There is a seeming banality to a geographical measurement. But Palestinian filmmaker Basma al-Sharif’s We Began by Measuring Distance is preoccupied with the politics of distance, and its relationship to connection and detachment. In its first half, unnamed characters list the kilometres separating cities that carry political and historical weight in a Palestinian context as sites of international talks and accords. Subsequently, the span between Gaza and Jerusalem changes at each blip. This turns the geographical into an increasing temporal distance, marked by crucial years in Palestine’s history–1967, 1948, 1917.

While those numbers are easily communicated, al-Sharif refuses an easy approach to convey other ways in which distance manifests itself, instead choosing the opacity of abstractions and associations. She creates a tapestry of image, sound, and text that eschews didacticism but is imbued with layers of memory, geography, and subjective experience. When the straightforward proof of a violent settler colonial regime has been there for people to find for so long, yet Western states and media still foreground narratives of complexity, that approach communicates something much more interesting. If it leaves an audience adrift, unsettled, dazed, then that’s its intention. We Began by Measuring Distance is one of al-Sharif’s earliest works, but it already demonstrates the evocative play with structural, formal, and temporal elements that will recur in her subsequent works.

An unsettling passage in the film has the audience mesmerised by the beautiful dance of a jellyfish and its tentacles, before they find a violent mirror image in footage of bombardments on Gaza. The film was released in 2009. Today, in spring 2026, we have spent two and a half years inundated with images of a live-streamed genocide. The tentacles of imperialism have intensified their grip on Palestine, Lebanon, and the wider region. Distance can feel both immense and marginal.