Mona Benyamin

Tomorrow, again stages a dysfunctional news broadcast consisting of different segments which recreate and react to various prominent daily catastrophes from Palestine. Instead of a spoken narrative, the film resorts to exaggerated emotional and physical displays, and utilises fragmented and often conflicting testimonies, doppelgängers, and a surrealist visual language to appeal to notions of truth and fiction, and different temporalities. The cast of the film sees two protagonists, the artist’s parents, assume multiple identities – from presenters to reportage subjects, to eyewitnesses – resulting in a mobius loop where they are the objects, the spectators, and the medium, who narrate and consume their own stories in an endless cycle. It explores the phenomena of mutism resultant from trauma, and the cognitive distortions which come from living in a constant state of emergency; and what happens to urgency when it becomes timeless.

Moonscape is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle of the road song, performed as a duet between a male and female singer, in Arabic. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons, and makes a connection between his story and that of the director's – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible.

Trouble in Paradise is a dysfunctional sitcom set out to explore humor as a mechanism of coping with trauma, pain, and taboos in relation to the Nakba and the Israeli occupation, by posing three sets of jokes ranging from the classical misogynistic genre to anti-jokes and culturally specific humor; in order to examine why Nakba jokes never fully evolved as a genre and entered the Palestinian mainstream. The main protagonists of the film are the artist’s parents who do not speak English and read the jokes from transliterated title cards and have went through the Nakba (1948) and the Naksa (1967) and never shared their memories from these major events.