LYD | Official Selection

PALESTINIAN SCI-FI SHOWCASE | Screens February 25 from 6.30pm at Cinema Nova

LYD - A SCI-FI DOCUMENTARY (2023) | AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE: This feature-length, sci-fi documentary shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. From the perspective of the city herself (voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi), the viewer is guided through her five-thousand-year-old life of a city that was once a thriving metropolis with a rich history; as far back as 636AD, it was considered the first capital of Palestine. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Lyd became an Israeli city, and in the process, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred and 50,000 were exiled. Today, the city has a Jewish Israeli majority and a Palestinian minority and is disinvested and divided by racism and violence. For Palestinians, Lyd’s story is a painful and tragic fall from grace. This moving, visually captivating film dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?

Using never-before-seen archival footage, the city explains that these events were so devastating that they fractured her reality. Now there are two Lyds –– one occupied and one free. As the film unfolds, documentary portions follow a chorus of characters through their daily lives, and vivid animations use the language of speculative fiction to envision an alternate reality where the same documentary characters live free from the trauma of the past and the violence of the present. As the film cuts between fantastical and documentary realities, it ultimately leaves the viewer questioning which future should prevail.

Screens with LARISSA SANSOUR'S SCI-FI TRILOGY: Themes of loss, belonging, heritage and national identity are explored in the three films A Space Exodus (2008), Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015, directed by Soren Lind) each examine different aspects of political turmoil in the near East. Larissa Sansour was born in Jerusalem and uses the languages of film and pop culture for her works, bringing the way of life, reality and complexity of everyday life in Palestine and the Middle East into visual forms. Her often humorous works rub shoulders with the gravity that is expected to deal with the region. MELBOURNE PREMIERES