THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE
(الجار قبل الدار)
Dir. Shaina Anand (CAMP), 2009-2011.
Jerusalem. 60 min.
In Arabic and English with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 - 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 - 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 12 - 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 31 - 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q&A

In an inversion of technology commonly used to observe and control, eight Palestinian families place a CCTV camera on the roof of their homes in East Jerusalem. Shot in 2009, and edited into its feature in 2011, each sequence of the THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE spotlights a different neighborhood, filmed and married to live commentary and dialogue by each of the families. These vantage points trace a geographical history of enclosure and dispossession, from a non-extant neighborhood along the Western Wall to views of IDF training exercises in the Western Wall Plaza, droves of tourists, and the Israeli surveillance apparatus itself. Two of the families in Sheikh Jarrah, evicted a few months before recording, observe and negotiate the distance between the settlers occupying their family home from across the street. Exceptional in its demonstration of how space articulates power, the film is a haptic and affective cinematic expansion of what post-1968 revolutionary Japanese critics and filmmakers called Fūkei-Ron, or landscape theory.

“The neighbourhood is scattered and inaccessible, the neighbour is turning out to be a monster. Going beyond the technical misuse of surveillance technologies, the filming methods open up to new potentials: a house becomes a support for a camera, a sort of tripod built from stones. The petrified position of the camera only allows movements on a fragile surface of the image. It is not possible to change the perspective and switch from one self to another.” –Florian Schneider

Members of CAMP will be present on August 31st for an in-person Q&A.