Magazine

Returning to her great-grandparents’ home in Moldova, where her uncle sexually abused her when she was nine years old, Lucovnicova films the site of her childhood trauma with a detached ambivalence. A shot of the house’s sunlit exterior is bookended by glimpses of uncle Tudor, contesting the idyllic quality of its rural setting. “So fresh, so green,” enthuses her mother, “it’s my childhood and my youth.” Lucovnicova’s lens might capture this nostalgia, but it does not endorse the sentiment.

In five minutes, Paradise scans what determines movement for racially distinct peoples. Borders seek to contain, and any transgressions are preemptively curbed through restrictive legislation or bureaucratic rigmarole. As architect and researcher Shahram Khosravi and Mahmoud Keshavarz point out in their article, “The Magic of Borders”, border fortifications—materialised through visa protocols, military operations, or propaganda media—facilitate mobility for the white traveller as much as they restrict it for racialised refugees.

The opening gesture in 20 Handshakes for Peace (2014) by Mahdi Fleifel sets the terms for “Reclaiming Archives”, a programme in which images—official, historical, and digital—no longer function as stable records of the past. Instead, they appear as sites of staging, distortion, and loss. The films approach archives through their gaps and distortions. Found footage is shown as incomplete and shaped by the systems that produced it.

In a series of intimate, domestic scenes that interweave the present with the past, Dhiaa Biya honours the weathered hands of a (deceased) grandmother. Through repetition of the same gestures, the hands of three generations of women merge, free from any obstacles posed by the passage of time. Is there a more beautiful part of the body than the hands to reflect on in order to rekindle the extinguished connection between head and body, a characteristic of these frenzied times?