Familiar Phantoms + And Still, It Remains
Søren Lind, Larissa Sansour, Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah / United Kingdom, Palestine & Algeria / 70 min
Two films nominated for CPH:DOX's Art Film Award.
Familiar Phantoms
Søren Lind & Larissa Sansour / United Kingdom & Palestine / 2024 / World Premiere / 42 min
Palestinian-Danish artist duo Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's new film is an elegiac and experimental work about memory, history and trauma.
‘Familiar Phantoms’ is inspired by anecdotes from artist Larissa Sansour’s own family history and her old childhood home in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining live action scenes, Super 8 footage and private photos, the edit reconstructs the labour of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in an existential search for meaning. The exploratory and contemplative camera moves around an abandoned mansion that serves as the seat of memory. Vignettes play in the rooms, adding a theatrical dimension to the work, just as memory is constantly reworking, amplifying, adding and subtracting.
And Still, It Remains
Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah / Algeria & United Kingdom / 2024 / World Premiere / 28 min
A meditation on time, justice and the aftermath of the French nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara.
A powerful meditation on the afterlives of French nuclear toxicity in southern Algeria, ‘And still, it remains’ offers a captivating picture of a community shaped but not circumscribed by its history. In Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara, we spend time with the Escamaran community as they narrate their accounts and understanding of what it means to live with colonial toxicity. Summoning the landscape as a witness and protagonist, film artists Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah delicately explore this forgotten history, which continues to live in the ecology and bodies of Mertoutek’s residents. Inverting the French narrative of technological triumph, the film returns to the site of the detonations to explore time, justice, decolonisation, and resilience in the face of enduring toxic colonialism.