SEWING BORDERS
Film 25’
Beirut/London, 2018
Commissioned by Ashkal Alwan for Video Works 2017
This short film worked with a group of Beirut residents with differing experiences of displacement. They studied maps of the city and of the region, and, through their sewing skills, they negotiated and narrated notions of spatial, temporal and historic borders.
The current narratives dominating the media and formal politics present refugees and migrants, particularly from the Middle East, as a threat, and their movement as an attack on the hosting countries, whether in Europe or the Middle East. This movement is perceived as ahistorical, isolated from the past of displacement and the implications of international and western colonial politics in the on going making of the Middle East as well as the role of political classes within modern day Middle East.
The film opened up the history of displacement in the Middle East and issues related to the representation of individuals in urban space. It moved across maps, documents and residents’ stories, exploring the role of representational techniques (map drawing) and processes (treaties, declarations) in the making of borders, while revealing their temporal nature through the residents’ lived experience. The film forced a historical consideration of borders and positioned them within a continuous timeline from past to present that implicated different cultures and political powers.
Sewing Borders was selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR 2018 in the Bright Future category, and Queer Lisboa International Film Festival 2018.