Ariela Aïsha Azoulay

Un-Documented argues against Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s film Statues Also Die (1963). Focusing on plundered objects in European museums and listening to the call of asylum seekers to enter European countries, their former colonizing powers, the film defends the idea that their rights are inscribed in these objects that were kept well documented all these years.

Can we imagine a world without borders, without the nation state and its monopoly on citizenship rights? In their third collaborative film Zanny Begg (Sydney) and Oliver Ressler (Vienna) focus on struggles to obtain citizenship, while at the same time questioning the implicitly exclusionary nature of this concept.

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This film travels over open books, looted objects and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape the film focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places. Objects held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. The film explores the substantial wealth accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labour, knowledge and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonisers’ cameras.

In 2002, I began working on a short film – The Chain of Food - dealing with the question: is there or isn’t there hunger in Palestine? The figures in the reports of several humanitarian organizations and statements by various officials seemed rather ambivalent to me. I assumed that there is hunger in Palestine and that outdated conceptual categories—which identify hunger with the swollen bellies of children, as in the case of Biafra—have prevented us from seeing the situation in the Occupied Territories as it truly is.