Two Meters of This Land shows what happens on a summer evening in an outdoor theatre in Ramallah (West Bank, Palestine), where a popular music concert is being prepared. A gallery of journalists, technicians and artists meets there some hours before the show. All the action takes place in that same location during one single evening. “One year before I shot the film I worked in Jerusalem and Ramallah while I was trying to get ideas for a feature film. Summer is the time for outdoor music festivals in Palestine and I visited many of them. That same summer, the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish died and he was buried at the summit of a Ramallah hill, very close to the outdoor theatre I set as the location for my film. I decided to use one of his poems for the title. In the last lines of Mural, he talks about the piece of territory he would need the day he died: "Two meters of this land are enough for me for now". Since I wanted to make a film about one particular space of Palestine, it seemed to me a dramatic metaphor of the Palestinian struggle.” (Ahmad Natche)

Spring equinox 2024: 20 March at three hours, six minutes, twenty-one seconds (GMT). Vattetot-sur-Mer, in the Pays de Caux region of Normandy. Gaza is being bombed… 

On 27 February 2024, like many other filmmakers and artists, I received a message from Narimane Mari inviting me to make a cinematic gesture rooted in Palestine — something that would bear witness to what is blotted out on the screens of History, when thousands of lives are targeted by Israeli airstrikes, forbidden from living on their land. But how, from so far away, can we share in the fear of death? How can one resist the world’s greatest misfortunes from one’s own garden? I imagined an action where I would move as little as possible. I filmed one minute per hour, for twenty-four hours, on the first day of spring, never once moving the camera from its position… Amid the wonder of spring — which plants, animals and humans all enjoy — bombs fall in the distance and echo inside the head. No real silence, no rest! (Pierre Creton)