here and not here
Andrea Zimmerman / Palestine & United Kingdom / 2025 / International Premiere / 30 min
A cinematic diary from the West Bank and the Golan Heights – places caught between occupation, oppression, and a lived, collective experience.
A film diary, dispatches from a place that both does and does not exist – a state in waiting, a geography beyond, but permanently besieged by, conflict, the sites of pressured being and the willed spaces of dream, desire, imagination and resistance. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Occupied Golan Heights as part of the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s ‘Ways of Traveling’ Residency 2020 – 2023 (inspired by John Berger), ‘here and not here’ seeks a poetics of expression that acknowledges the perennial challenges of Occupation while refusing the imposed, pejorative, partial and reductive mediatised definitions of a people under constant and escalating oppressions. Charting encounter – with and between people and place and the more than human – here and not here celebrates not the ‘cruel optimism’ of a false hope but rather celebrates the lived experience of a profoundly precious yet always precarious ‘everyday life’.
