Directing
A clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East.
In an underground orchard in Bethlehem, decades after an otherworldly ecodisaster, two scientists discuss exile, loss and nostalgia.
Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.
An Arabic-language opera about mourning and inherited trauma. Performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish, it fuses Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Masha’al, a traditional Palestinian song.
Bethlehem Bandolero is a kitsch video featuring Sansour herself as a Mexican gunslinger arriving in Bethlehem for a duel with the Israeli Wall.
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A Space Exodus quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognisable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour's film.
Soup Over Bethlehem depicts an ordinary Palestinian family, Sansour's own, around a dinner table on a rooftop overlooking the West Bank city of Bethlehem. What starts as a culinary discussion about the national dish 'mloukhieh' soon evolves into a personal and engaging conversation about politics - thereby emphasising the symbiosis of food and politics so indicative of the Palestinian experience.
Through this intimate and fictionalized dinner, an impossible happening becomes real. The work explores cultural fabrications and similarities in a non-mediated moment outside the Western gaze - even if the space it seeks is invariably conditioned by it. This work was initially a 3-channel video installation
Dressed as a kind of super hero in all black and a red helmet, Larissa Sansour films herself running around Palestine.
In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion, archival images and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
