Aala Marma Hajar (A Stone’s Throw)
Razan Alsalah, 2023, 40′
In Arabic, with English subtitles
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. A Stone’s Throw trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.
Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian filmmaker, programmer and teacher based in Tiohtià:ke, Montreal. Her work investigates the material aesthetics of disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. Her films are both ghostly trespasses and seeping ruptures of the colonial image, functioning as another border, another wall. She thinks of her creative process as a collective recollection in a circle of relations with one another and the unknown. AlSalah is a member of the Regards palestiniens film collective and teaches film at Concordia University.
The film is shown together with ‘What we said to Brussels Airlines’ by Collectif Faire-part and is part of Courtisane Festival 2026 · Undercurrents 16 – Crossing Horizons
More infos: https://www.courtisane.be/en/event/undercurrents-16-crossing-horizons