Explosions in Landscapes
Three films on Palestine
Xiaolu Guo
Ramallah, Palestine, Décembre 2018
Director JULIETTE LE MONNYER
Year
2025
Country BELGIUM
here and not here
Director ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN
Year
2026
Country
PALESTINE, UK
Intersecting Memory
Director
SHAYMA’ AWAWDEH
Year
2025
Country FRANCE, PALESTINE
In Hold Everything Dear (2007), John Berger wrote about the visual ruins of the Palestinian landscape, but also about the ruins of language—how language has been ravaged by the Israeli occupation of Palestine: “Everywhere one goes in Palestine—even in rural areas—one finds oneself amongst rubble …There’s also the rubble of words—the rubble of words that house nothing any more, whose sense has been destroyed.” Language fails or is lost, when we are robbed of the home and the land we belong to.
here and not here is a formidable short film from Berger’s collaborator and comrade Andrea Luka Zimmerman, which contemplates these visual and linguistic ruins by means of highly stylised images. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, the scenes grow out of a deep collaboration with locals. Zimmerman’s camera ranges over the marginalised people and scarred landscapes, but never reduces them to victims, or mere representations of political conflicts. They question the very nature of the landscape, showing olive groves under the sun, animals on the road, rocks lying silently in front of destroyed buildings. Indeed, there are no innocent landscapes, the filmmaker reflects, and if we gaze at the battered landscapes long enough, we might read their narratives. In fifteen impressionistic scenes, we hear birdsong, we see villages encircled by wires, places and humans that exist but resist definition or categorisation. Zimmerman notes that our ability to imaginatively name newborns allows us to name weapons, too; the production of killing machines seems to be a part of life, especially for those who engage in violence. But perhaps their most astonishing observation relates to the idea of zoos. The zoo should never become a metaphor, but razor-wired enclosures cage in Palestinian villages, and create ‘zoos’ of human life. The villagers cannot get out; they are watched by armed ‘zookeepers’. The metaphor is made vivid by a cinematic choreography of miniature animals: zebras, giraffes, turtles. Palestine is a sorrowful zoo.
Ramallah, Palestine, Décembre 2018, by Brussels-based filmmaker Juliette Le Monnyer, is another short film coming from the heartland of the painful conflict. The filmmaker has said that she hadn’t intended on making a film when she first went to the West Bank. The impetus to film came from witnessing daily the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, “with all its checkpoints, humiliations and scenes of violence”—when reality is as shocking as an ongoing theatre of cruelty, what a documentarist needs to do is find an angle and simply document what is there, and what there is to see. In a truly courageous act, Le Monnyer manages to deliver a vital visual documentation of the occupation of the Palestinian territory. The film takes the form of a ten-minute-long single-take, without edit or intercut, that records, in real time, a confrontation in the occupied West Bank—as if we were right there in Ramallah, on a small hill, looking down at the ruined city. We see Israeli soldiers, illegally stationed in the area, while local Palestinians watch from a distance. We hear gun shots and warnings from a loudspeaker. Black smoke billows upward. The camera pans slowly, trying to find where the explosion is. Locals are running and soldiers are moving about. There are always children in the scene, chattering and pointing towards the distant explosions. One little boy laughs. Where are their parents? The camera pans again and captures one of the still standing buildings, burnt and hollowed out by the explosion and the fire, perhaps from some days ago, or some months ago. All is lost.
The last film in this programme, Shayma' Awawdeh's Intersecting Memory, is a moving reflection on memory and childhood. It opens with a powerful scene; we gaze at a building in Hebron when—suddenly—a huge bang brings it to rubble. Kids begin to run, locals try to lift away the debris, digging things out from under the wreckage. A mother cries, men shout to each other. The filmmaker was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out, depicted in the footage she has found in a box of old videotapes. She recounts the past, layering poignant memories from her childhood over these scenes in a voice-over narration. The narrator speaks about her mother and her school life, what she wore on her first day of school: a blue striped uniform with a white bow in her hair. Narrated against the backdrop of wires, soldiers, and war-ravaged spaces, Awawdeh’s personal recollections come to stand in for the Palestinian collective memory, and the film’s layering convey the emotional ruin that occupation has wrought. She recalls precious moments in her youth: “We sat down and ate falafel sandwiches. We drank grape juice, added fried cauliflower in mine. Oh, how delicious that was. I have been searching for that taste ever since.” Indeed, the children of the war remain innocent, playful and spirited, in spite of their devastating reality. Under the white sun, life in all its forms thrives. The filmmaker says: “Look, the almond trees are blooming. Breath in, all the way, into your heart.”
Xiaolu Guo is a renowned Chinese British filmmaker and novelist. She has directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today, UFO In Her Eyes, We Went to Wonderland, The Concrete Revolution, Once Upon A time Proletarian. Her feature She, a Chinese received the Golden Leopard Award in 2009 Locarno Film Festival. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and Call Me Ishmaelle. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Intersecting Memories’ at Rich Mix, 16 April 2026.
here and not here is a formidable short film from Berger’s collaborator and comrade Andrea Luka Zimmerman, which contemplates these visual and linguistic ruins by means of highly stylised images. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, the scenes grow out of a deep collaboration with locals. Zimmerman’s camera ranges over the marginalised people and scarred landscapes, but never reduces them to victims, or mere representations of political conflicts. They question the very nature of the landscape, showing olive groves under the sun, animals on the road, rocks lying silently in front of destroyed buildings. Indeed, there are no innocent landscapes, the filmmaker reflects, and if we gaze at the battered landscapes long enough, we might read their narratives. In fifteen impressionistic scenes, we hear birdsong, we see villages encircled by wires, places and humans that exist but resist definition or categorisation. Zimmerman notes that our ability to imaginatively name newborns allows us to name weapons, too; the production of killing machines seems to be a part of life, especially for those who engage in violence. But perhaps their most astonishing observation relates to the idea of zoos. The zoo should never become a metaphor, but razor-wired enclosures cage in Palestinian villages, and create ‘zoos’ of human life. The villagers cannot get out; they are watched by armed ‘zookeepers’. The metaphor is made vivid by a cinematic choreography of miniature animals: zebras, giraffes, turtles. Palestine is a sorrowful zoo.
Ramallah, Palestine, Décembre 2018, by Brussels-based filmmaker Juliette Le Monnyer, is another short film coming from the heartland of the painful conflict. The filmmaker has said that she hadn’t intended on making a film when she first went to the West Bank. The impetus to film came from witnessing daily the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, “with all its checkpoints, humiliations and scenes of violence”—when reality is as shocking as an ongoing theatre of cruelty, what a documentarist needs to do is find an angle and simply document what is there, and what there is to see. In a truly courageous act, Le Monnyer manages to deliver a vital visual documentation of the occupation of the Palestinian territory. The film takes the form of a ten-minute-long single-take, without edit or intercut, that records, in real time, a confrontation in the occupied West Bank—as if we were right there in Ramallah, on a small hill, looking down at the ruined city. We see Israeli soldiers, illegally stationed in the area, while local Palestinians watch from a distance. We hear gun shots and warnings from a loudspeaker. Black smoke billows upward. The camera pans slowly, trying to find where the explosion is. Locals are running and soldiers are moving about. There are always children in the scene, chattering and pointing towards the distant explosions. One little boy laughs. Where are their parents? The camera pans again and captures one of the still standing buildings, burnt and hollowed out by the explosion and the fire, perhaps from some days ago, or some months ago. All is lost.
The last film in this programme, Shayma' Awawdeh's Intersecting Memory, is a moving reflection on memory and childhood. It opens with a powerful scene; we gaze at a building in Hebron when—suddenly—a huge bang brings it to rubble. Kids begin to run, locals try to lift away the debris, digging things out from under the wreckage. A mother cries, men shout to each other. The filmmaker was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out, depicted in the footage she has found in a box of old videotapes. She recounts the past, layering poignant memories from her childhood over these scenes in a voice-over narration. The narrator speaks about her mother and her school life, what she wore on her first day of school: a blue striped uniform with a white bow in her hair. Narrated against the backdrop of wires, soldiers, and war-ravaged spaces, Awawdeh’s personal recollections come to stand in for the Palestinian collective memory, and the film’s layering convey the emotional ruin that occupation has wrought. She recalls precious moments in her youth: “We sat down and ate falafel sandwiches. We drank grape juice, added fried cauliflower in mine. Oh, how delicious that was. I have been searching for that taste ever since.” Indeed, the children of the war remain innocent, playful and spirited, in spite of their devastating reality. Under the white sun, life in all its forms thrives. The filmmaker says: “Look, the almond trees are blooming. Breath in, all the way, into your heart.”
Xiaolu Guo is a renowned Chinese British filmmaker and novelist. She has directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today, UFO In Her Eyes, We Went to Wonderland, The Concrete Revolution, Once Upon A time Proletarian. Her feature She, a Chinese received the Golden Leopard Award in 2009 Locarno Film Festival. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and Call Me Ishmaelle. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Intersecting Memories’ at Rich Mix, 16 April 2026.