Ouroboros

Director: Basma Alsharif

2017 / 77min / DCP

Shot in Gaza, Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, and Brittany, Alsharif’s experimental “homage to the Gaza Strip”—her first film made with actors—is an elliptical, globe-trotting love story, a collection of beguiling reverse-motion imagery, and a tribute “to the desperate, everyday resilience of the people of Gaza.” [Frieze] “I developed the film around the concept of the ‘eternal return’, the idea that life is a cycle of recurrences, as seen in the symbol of the snake eating its own tail—an ouroboros. I used this to explore whether we are necessarily doomed to repeat our mistakes or if the only way to survive is to forget. This is something I saw happening in Gaza—that the only way to move forward and survive the atrocities that are happening there is to forget the past.” —Basma Alsharif

Part of Basma Alsharif