Sección Oficial 2024

FAMILIAR PHANTOMS

Larissa Sansour y Søren Lind| 2023|42'

SYNOPSIS

Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Sansour’s own family history and her old childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining scenes filmed in a derelict mansion, Super 8 footage and private photos, the editing mimics the workings of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in search of meaning. Throughout the film, the mansion serves as the seat of memory. In the rooms, vignettes are played out, adding a theatrical dimension, enlarging and exaggerating the narrative components, just as memory perpetually reworks, reinforces, adds and subtracts. While most scenes are acted out by actors, other scenes turn objects and mementos into sculptural installations, a dark space decorated with dozens of suspended love bird cages, a group of taxidermy seagulls sitting on the floor or a free-standing sink full to the brim of lemons

BIOGRAPHY

Larissa Sansour y Søren 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.

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Critical text

A profound, painful and tender dance of memory is staged in the last work of the brilliant tandem formed by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. All is based on her memories and the existential odysseys of her family, especially the transits of her father between Palestine, Iraq and the Soviet Union, where he met her mother. The movie displays a plethora of tones, with images of multiple natures, from the home movies filmed in Super 8 and photographs from the family album to a stylized and brilliant reconstruction of that past: Sansour's childhood in Palestine, evoked with meticulous attention to objects and sounds that belonged only to her, but are formulated in a masterful way until they acquire a universal dimension. If in her previous works Sansour and Lind embraced dystopia to glimpse the crossroads and the unbreakable spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people, in their new work they look back on an exciting and flourishing exercise of personal archeology with the aim of preserving the image and History, as threatened as the own identity of that people who, despite the invariable occupation of their space, the perpetual annihilation of its population for three quarters of a century, and the attempts to degrade its memory, existed, exists and will exist. JAVIER H. ESTRADA

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