Lessons of darkness

What haunts the land

Three men, all at a remove from their homelands, become an entry point into three expansive, hybrid non-fiction narratives rooted in legacies of imperialism, land exploitation and extractivism, connecting contemporary conditions and the archive of the histories informing them.

Marcel Mrejen’s visually immersive Memories of an Unborn Sun starts us off, with a migrant worker sharing his experience toiling for Chinese construction sites in the Algerian desert, the same region where the French conducted nuclear testing in the 1960s, highlighting a stark neocolonial reality. In Suneil Sanzgiri’s Golden Jubilee, the director’s father, who grew up under Portuguese colonial rule in Goa before emigrating to the US, moves through a virtual rendering of his old family home, created with the very same mapping technology used by mining companies to ravage the region for iron ore extraction. Finally, Razan AlSalah’s A Stone’s Throw focuses on Palestinian elder Amine, whose experiences of displacement highlight and connect colonial contexts of resource extraction and work camps in the SWANA region and the ongoing Zionist occupation of Palestine.

Imperial and extractivist legacies continue to haunt lands and peoples across the world. Each of these works exposes and confronts these spectres, reflecting on material realities and memory through both their narratives and formal devices. By connecting the past and present and by connecting with each other, they broaden our understanding and function as another force for the continued, collective struggle for liberation.

This programme softly complements the recent launch of the first issue of Talking Shorts’ print publication outlooks outlooks, a collection of texts on cinematic and global contexts that have historically been underexposed by a largely Eurocentric short film industry. The films the programme What haunts the land relate to some of the artists, themes and contexts discussed in the publication, including writing on Razan AlSalah’s previous short Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba, and an imaginary screening of key works in Indian avant-garde cinema. We hope that reading outlooks will further expand on what this programme intends for its audience.

The new publication of the Talking Shorts platform, outlooks, will be presented on Wednesday, August 19 at 12:15 at Baza, Youth Center Ljubljana.

Sanne Jehoul