While not explicitly stated as such, the film serves as a meeting point between Italian-born Elettra Bisogno and Hazem Alqaddi, who arrived in Belgium in 2018, after a long and terrible journey from Gaza. Belgium and art become two fractured homes for those two people, as the camera draws and redraws the map of one’s own borders and boundaries. This is perhaps why the camera is handheld at all times, unstable and mobile to the point that the human hand is very much imprinted in every flickering, uneven pan. As for the images the camera is drawn to, they are scattered and far from linear in their storytelling, as blurry faces, groups of old and young men, close-ups of hands spread on the floor all assemble themselves around Hazem’s narration. Off screen, his words conjure a journey we are invited to relate to the (seemingly random) images on screen.
“I wake up. What is this smell?,” Hazem wonders with a poetic lull. “Embers everywhere. It burns,” he continues as the frame we see fills with smoke. Alas, no embers in sight, but the sensory appeal to his narration already allows the viewer to join in, to borrow a point of view. Old Child unfolds with a concealed pathos that de-centers the trivial first-person shots and sequences one may be accustomed to. Subjectivity reigns as the narrator’s stream of consciousness pours on screen (and through the subtitles), and its hold is so strong I don’t feel the need to ground the words into the images I see. But their visible pixels and slightly skewed perspectives seem to bother me.
Occasionally, I’d spot a lens flare and a reflection, what looks like dust superimposed over those picturesque images of clouds and skies. Is my own screen too dusty, or am I seeing a camera recording of another screen? The camera in Old Child is certainly human (human-held), but as it pans, tilts, tracks, and circles around men, always in brief sequences, it seems like it’s searching for something lost.
Hazem’s camera, mouse cursor, and hand are all grasping at the pieces of memory. A photo of his father with Yasser Arafat, a Google Maps satellite view of Shokat as-Sufi (a Palestinian town in the Gaza strip under Israeli occupation) and its destroyed airport, a Google Earth version of our planet that turns with the click and drag.“I move the world,” he exclaims jubilantly, laughing at this possibility to virtually align himself with God. It is funny to think that in filmmaking jargon, the shot from above is called ‘God’s eye view’, yet that’s a promise a camera can never fully deliver.
In another sequence, Hazem’s hand enters the frame and clasps its fingers over the red buds of a blossoming tree. The slow-motion and intentional camera movements recording his hand remind me of The Gleaners and I, in which Agnès Varda captures her ageing palm by holding the digital camera with the other hand. Similarly, Old Child radiates a sensual glow even at its most pixelated. Overexposed images occasionally fade to white. The bodies of men holding machine guns swing in and out of view as much as the bodies of young girls rollerblading—two more ways to mark the memory-fragments as part of lives lived. It is in the recording, the counting and categorising of things seen and felt, that filmmakers can find solace and the hope that not all is lost: at least not when it’s filmed.
