Son[i]a #460
Razan AlSalah
'Your Father Was Born A Hundred Years Old, And So Was The Nakba'
Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian filmmaker, artist, and teacher whose work moves through militant cinema and collective filmmaking practices, as well as archives and digital infrastructures. She approaches the image not as a transparent evidence, but as a contested terrain: a site where histories are produced, obscured, weaponized, and reclaimed. Her films often inhabit the unstable space between visibility and disappearance, asking how one might return to places rendered inaccessible, and how images can both reinforce and resist colonial borders and ways of seeing.
Drawing from anti-colonial cinema, found footage, oral histories, and fragmented archives, Razan AlSalah develops a practice attentive to the political life of images and the material conditions of their circulation. Her work reflects on the excessive image production surrounding Palestine, the normalization of violence through repetition, and the infrastructures, whether technological, military, and ideological. And how they shape what can be seen and remembered. Against this, she proposes other modes of creative encounter: collective processes of filmmaking and resistance forms of distribution, rooted in relation, opacity, and solidarity.
In this podcast, Razan AlSalah reflects on the role of artistic imagination in the context of ongoing catastrophe and on cinema as a site of gathering, resistance, and rehearsed return. We talk about archives as both evidence and border, the camera as a mediating and potentially violent device, and the ways images are mobilized for population control and self-fulfilling colonial narratives. We also discuss solidarity, censorship and the need to redirect attention toward images produced by resistance movements themselves, not simply as documents of suffering but as tools for reclaiming historical and political agency.
Conversation: Anna Ramos and Alexandra Bellini. Script, sound production and voice over: pantea. Sounds: RWM sound library.
ATTRIBUTION/NON-COMMERCIAL/SHARE-ALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
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