Abstract

This thesis puts formal analysis of films by Kamal Aljafari and Larissa Sansour in dialogue with scholarship on both contemporary Palestinian issues and their cinematic representations. Through this analysis I highlight the visuality of the ecological and architectural violence sustained by Palestinians and the resistance to these structures of oppression realized by Aljafari’s and Sansour’s images. Their films showcase a Palestinian perspective on spatial issues in their engagement with built and natural environments through film form, demonstrating how cinema can foster reimagined futures. Palestinian cinema provides a mode of resistance to Zionist spatial logic and to the occupation. To clarify this, I explore how Israel’s settler colonial project uses infrastructure and ecology as tools to maintain control of Palestinian land through my analysis of a promotional video by Zionist tree-planting organization HaYovel. Palestinian cinema resists this and this thesis argues that many Palestinian filmmakers, including Aljafari and Sansour, reclaim Palestinian space using the medium of cinema and cinematic techniques. Because of the lack of physical access to Palestine for diasporic Palestinians, inhabiting space digitally and imagining new spatial configurations through cinematic techniques allow these filmmakers to experience a different kind of presence on the land. I analyze several recent short films by Aljafari and Sansour to demonstrate how editing, mise-en-scène, and dialogue allow for filmmakers to transgress imposed spatial boundaries and return to Palestine, if only digitally.