Remember this Place: 31°20’46’’N 34°46’46’’E
Synopsis
What happens when then place you call home is threatened to be erased? Remember this place 31°20’ 46”N 34° 46’ 46”E explores the concept of a home that has been threatened in the physical world, yet continues to survive thanks to the determination of local women who are fighting daily to preserve their rights to the land. The story does not take place in one location. It does not have one protagonist. It is a journey across many homes, with many women. Throughout the journey, we meet women who are activists, architects, artists, and poets who are working to preserve their home, cuture, and histories from being erased. The film brings together fragments of spaces, personal memories and visions of the future, in order to create a virtual universe that speaks about home.
The process
This narrative documentary project was developed as the result of a two-year engagement and field work with different Palestinian Bedouin communities. During this time, I partnered with female Bedouin leaders from across various communities, and with them, organized a series of storytelling workshops, as well as informal gatherings, and “listening sessions,” where we recorded stories about the community’s past, present, and future. With the use of word association exercises, we recorded personal and collective memories: The focus was to explore subjective memories of home, childhood, and day-to-day life; and then to digitize fragments and spaces of homes, specially across communities threatened to be displaced. Initially, the idea was to map and digitize Bedouin spaces that were being erased in real time, in order to have a three dimensional record of these physical spaces that could eventually exist in the virtual world, or in ‘metaverse,’ spaces; and secondly to use these digitizations in order to build a virtual world that a viewer or participant could inhabit: to allow participants to enter the “memory spaces,” or virtual representations of spaces that were disappearing in the real world.
Images
Credits
- Director & Writer
- Patricia Echeverria Liras
- In collaboration with
- Lobna Alsana; Roba Fraowna; Sheikha Helawy; Sabah alTuri; Fatima Fraowna
- Production
- The Office for Public Therapy Politics & the Media Majlis at Northwestern University in Qatar
- Sound Design
- Dirar Kalash
- VR Development
- APPIA; Thalamus
- Local Team
- Kareem Yehia; Lobna Alsana; Saqer Alkawazba; Mohammed Juber; Mohammad Shabaan; Nahida Tannous
- 3D
- Stephen Wessels; Oleksy Ryuksuk
- Photography
- Patricia Echeverria Liras; Liebe Blekh
- Editing
- Patricia Echeverria Liras; Pau Benazet
Selected presentations
Cairotronica. Cairo, Egypt.
Darat al Funun. Exhibition. Amman, Jordan.
Arab Film Festival Zurich. Zurich, Switzerland.
Filmmaker Fest. Milan, Italy.