A mysterious drive across the desolate land of the Sinai Peninsula led by a group of trafficking Bedouins. Habib Allah follows them behind the lines of military checkpoints, off the political, economic, and historical grid, a place where these desert outliers quietly continue their lineage. Stories, itineraries, directions, and allegiances become as blurred as the status of the Bedouins themselves, who remain unrecognized non-citizens of this no man’s land.
Atomic Park is a place in the White Sands desert (New Mexico), not far away from Trinity Site, where the first atom bomb exploded in july 1945. This national park provides an ambivalent landscape, as well suited for a picknick as for ballistic tests. A white desert, like a natural exhibition hall, in which every presence, every movement can provoke diverse interpretations. Like a faint echo we hear Marilyn Monroe’s desperate monologue and accusation about man's violence from the Misfits.
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Chile and Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes, coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, blue whales, and more. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.
And still, it remains tells the story of Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara and home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Surrounded by ancient rock art, the area was also the site of French nuclear bombs between 1961-66 and continues to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout circulating in the water and soil. Summoning the landscape as a witness and protagonist; experiences of French nuclear experiments, faith and justice are narrated by the voices of multiple residents. By affording the residents distance from the lens, the film also pushes against forms of visual capture that reproduce a colonial gaze and challenges visibility as the currency for political redress. Winds migrating across the Sahara have recently carried sand containing nuclear remains back to France – a reminder that the environmental afterlives of colonialism cannot be contained or forgotten.
