The Sun and the Looking Glass

Synopsis

On a land perpetually threatened by colonial appropriation, the transmission of history and narratives plays a particular and vital role. The Sun and the Looking Glass - for one easily forgets but the tree remembers is an artistic essay-film. It paints a portrait of a place on a hill above the Palestinian village of Ein Qiniya. Surrounded by earth, roads, and trees, the landscape pulls us into an undying world before walls, before checkpoints, before erasure. There, we go back in time through objects uncovered in the renovation of two late Ottoman houses. Looking at the objects through a magnifying lens, the film becomes part performance, part historical document told through disappearances and revelations. To blind oneself to anything in this place, to erase it from the narrative, is to exploit the past to justify the present.