Shot in the ruins of Gaza and the West Bank, August 2009. Cast Lead, the IDF codename for the Gaza war of 2009, is a term derived from Haim Nachman Bialik's Hannukah poem about a game played with a spinning dreidel made of lead.
Cinematography and Editing by Trevor Tweeten
Colorist and Post Production by Jerome Thelia.
Shahid
4min 52sec
A short terror video made in Gaza. Possibly the only such video ever made by non-Palestinian producers. As a result, the representation breaks with the conventions of the Palestinian suicide video genre. In Arabic, shahid means martyr, or witness.
Cinematography and Editing by Trevor Tweeten.
Digital Color and Post Production by Jerome Thelia.
Theatre of War
4min 06sec
Theatre of War was shot from one of Saddam Hussein's hilltop palaces situated in the mountains overlooking the River Tigris in central Iraq. It is a slow, virtually static video piece redolent of classical history painting. Audio was recorded at the official US military hand-over ceremony at the nearby city of Saniya. A mullah's prayer for unity among Arabs is spoken, after which the pan-Arab national anthem, Mawtini (My Homeland) is played, emphasizing Arab national solidarity and a pan-Arab territory. March 2009.
Cinematography and Editing by Trevor Tweeten.
Digital Color and Post Production by Jerome Thelia.
Untitled (Iraq) 2009
4min 55sec
Hastily set targets lie on the horizon for strafing in the late afternoon. Bored American soldiers kill time in the desert, picking out these haunting forms in the scopes and sites of their weapons. Bullet scored paraphernalia lie scattered in these dangerous wastes, evoking sculpture by Giacometti, Moore, Serra. Live and spent fire litter the surrounding landscape, creating an indelible image of the playfulness of destruction. The soundtrack invokes a roll of Iraqi place names, some of which are immediately recognizable to us through countless news dispatches from Iraqi wars.
Cinematography and Editing by Trevor Tweeten.
Digital Color and Post Production by Jerome Thelia.
Souffleur
5min 44sec
In an article written several years ago, Robert Fisk referred to the wreck of a Nazi-allied Vichy French U-Boat which lies beneath the waves off the coast of Beirut. The submarine was called Le Souffleur, and was sunk in 1941 by British destroyers which had followed it up the coast from Palestine.
Souffleur was made in sixteen hours as part of the 98 weeks workshop, Beirut, September 2008.
Killcam
5min 52sec
Amputees and other wounded Iraq war veterans recovering in Walter Reed Veterans Hospital compete tournament style against each other on several giant plasma screens playing Iraq-themed combat video games. This footage is cut with actual leaked combat footage from Iraq showing strafing missile attacks and assassinations with original soldiers' battle commentary. Silver Spring, Maryland, May 2008.
Untitled (Ireland) 2007
11min 9sec
Lough Neagh, a large lake near Belfast, produces the tastiest eels in the world. Starting in the 1960s, when the lake was owned by the absentee Lord Shaftesbury, a priest in the village of Toombe Bridge collectivised the local community to buy out the lake's eeling rights and establish a profitable grass-roots fishing cooperative. Symbols of this activism, the eels and a horse's head perform in a large iron vessel, designed for skinning pigs, but now situated in an ornamental garden. Working backwards from the site of tragedy, the work alludes to a cathartic forgetting of atrocities in recent Irish memory.
Fraternity
5min 10sec
Fraternity was shot at Yale University's infamous DKE frat house in under an hour. The men were happy to participate in the project in exchange for a keg of beer. They compete against each other to shout or scream the loudest and for the longest time. When they cannot scream any longer they must stop, and cannot begin again. DKE (pronounced Deke) stands for Delta Kappa Epsilon, and counts five US presidents in its alumni, including George Bush Jr, George Bush Sr, Gerald Ford and Theodore Roosevelt. Other famous Dekes include three Justices of the US Supreme Court, one Vice President, and countless State Governors, Senators and Speakers.
Jew On A Ball
6min 47sec
Made during the Israeli-Lebanon war in 2006, Jew On A Ball is a piece in which the Arab/Israeli situation is reduced to the point of sexuality where love becomes cruel and painful. The boy desperately tries to stay on top of the ball, continually fails, keeps trying, but hurts himself over and over again. The girl speaks of love as a dagger or burial.
Ya'ni Intifada
2min 28sec
Ya'ni is a very common word in Arabic with a host of meanings. Most often, it means meaning, or it means, or like, and is used to string the sentence out when the speaker is searching for words for what he means. Like the word ya'ni, intifada is another word with a host of meanings in Arabic, and has only recently come to be associated with the Palestinian struggle. The interviews were made with students at Bir Zeit University. The footage shot whilst driving was made on the road between Gaza and Jerusalem, in the West Bank. Made during the International Artists Workshop, Ramallah, 2005.
