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"One cannot colonize without a map, which is especially true of the demolished and settled territories of Palestine, where advanced public-private surveillance programs, such a Google’s contributions of cloud computing and facial recognition software to Israel or the AI targeting system known as Lavender, subject ordinary people to constant monitoring and the threat of execution from ground level to lower earth orbit. Accompanying the direct horror of guns, bombs, and bulldozers are these hidden mechanisms for apartheid and military violence. This August, Spectacle continues its Palestine solidarity and fundraising screenings with two experimental documentaries that offer subversive ways to scrutinize and utilize surveillance and aerial imaging technologies.
"Following up last month’s screenings of Indian artist group CAMP’s FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF is THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE, another radical exercise in collaborative documentary filmmaking in which eight Palestinian families place a CCTV camera on top of their homes and elucidate the changing face of a claustrophobic Jerusalem. Accompanying this work is Canada-based Palestinian filmmaker Razan AlSalah’s latest feature, A STONE’S THROW, a biographical portrait of AlSalah’s father who fled Haifa as a child during the first Nakba, told partially through the use of Google Maps and a mix of other analog and digital media.
"What both films raise through these technologies are anti-imperialist panoramas and satellite views of occupied Palestinian landscapes, and in the case of A STONE’S THROW, polluting extractive zones. These films also offer alternative means of addressing the often imbalanced dynamics between documentary subject and filmmaker, bringing with them urgent insights into mobility, power, and the politics of looking." -Spectacle