7 minutes
Shadi Habib Allah
Experimental
2018 - Palestine
Canadian Premiere

Screens with: Hurdle

When the Egyptian government acquired US devices capable of tracking phone calls and conversations, some Bedouins in the Sinai Peninsula started using 2G phones to better shield themselves from surveillance; and some Bedouins developed coded dialects that are inaccessible to the rest of the region dwellers. The artist acquired some of these conversations and their translations and had them encrypted on mini computers. For this to happen, the artist commissioned a group of Palestinian engineers to set up a DIY phone network. When set up properly, the network opens the calls and provides the translation on a screen. Through trial and error, the process becomes the carrying narrative of the film as engineers argue about methods to fulfill the task. The people onscreen could well be Egyptian state authorities – and their efforts of decoding subversive exchanges between members of the Bedouin tribe, infamous for moving goods illegally across the borders between Egypt, Palestine and other areas around. In either case, their approach, the zeal of discovery, remains the same. What alters is the meaning afforded by the context - ‘invention’ in the first case, ‘hazard’ in the other.

Past Festivals
Berlin International File Festival

Co-presented by Toronto Arab Film and Independent Jewish Voices