Espejos 2024

As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night

Larissa Sansour, Soren Lind | 2022 | 21'

SYNOPSIS

As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night presents a single aria is performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish. The aria is a new composition based on Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and the Palestinian traditional song Mashaal. The piece is presented in black and white as a three-screen projection, like an altar triptych. The film poetically chronicles a century of trauma, starting with the cataclysm of World War 1 which initiated a never-ending cycle of violence with dire consequences for the Palestinian reality, as for the region and wider international community. In the original lyrics of Mashaal, a Palestinian woman mourns the enlistment of her loved one in the Ottoman army to fight in World War 1 on the side of his occupier. In the decades to follow, the original song lyrics expanded to encompass further disasters and exoduses, thus becoming an ever-evolving reflection of the Palestinian experience. In the spirit of the song’s eternal flux, As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night adds its own new verses and merges it with Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Throughout the aria, Mahler’s European starting point gradually morphs into the Palestinian song, blending the two musical traditions along the way.

BIOGRAPHY

Larissa Sansour, Soren Lind

LARISSA SANSOUR (East Jerusalem, 1973) is a Palestinian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in London. Her work, which has had a notable international impact, combines reflection on the colonisation of Palestine with significant amounts of humour, science fiction and fantasy.

SØREN LIND (Denmark, 1970) is a writer and multidisciplinary artist whose works, many of them signed with Larissa Sansour, have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the MoMA, as well as at festivals such as Rotterdam and the Berlinale.

Multimedia

Critical text

In her unusual and sublime sci-fi trilogy, Larissa Sansour delved into the dystopian to depict the future Palestinian existence in an alienating and agonising abyss, further and further away from their homeland. The first part, Space Exodus (2008), imagined the arrival of the first Palestinian on the moon, configuring the satellite as a forced destination for a people without a homeland or help on Earth. This was followed by Nation Estate (2012) —now with Søren Lind as co-director— which took a humorous prism to show another delirious solution to the conflict: the location of all Palestinians in an immense skyscraper, a high-flying ghetto, isolated from the rest of humanity but caressing the infinity of the sky. He closed the triptych In the Future, They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016), set in a devastated Palestine, in which a group of resistance fighters bury porcelain crockery that will serve as vestiges of a people that existed, the memory preserved in the face of systematic destruction and global neglect. It is terrifying that Sansour's sophisticated and imaginative apocalyptic works stand as the most realistic and lucid reflections on the situation in the Middle East today. The duo then delved into the trauma of an identity in the abyss marked by exile and diaspora with In Vitro (2019) and the eternal intergenerational union of the Palestinian people in As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night (2022). JAVIER H. ESTRADA

Technical Sheet

Estreno en España |

Directors: Larissa Sansour, Soren Lind

Script: Soren Lind

Composer: Anthony Sahyoun

Producer: Ali Roche

Cinematography: Anna Valdez Hanks

Editor: Sue Giovanni