Exercício de Montagem

Exercício de Montagem is a film in progress that is a performance that is a film that is a performance: an attempt to make sense of something that has been seen and cannot be unseen in that place called Palestine. A performance that rehearses the editing of a film imagined during a trip to Palestine in 2023.

How do Palestinians live in the West Bank? And in East Jerusalem? And in ’48? What is their daily life like? Where are they able to move, and where are they forbidden to go? What is a checkpoint, and how does it shape these people’s everyday lives? Why did M., in a café in East Jerusalem, ask us to open our eyes because “everything is political”?

Narrated in two voices — one of them that of the Palestinian artist Tarab طرب — this is just one of the possible editing exercises of a complex and traumatic story, drawn from the daily lives of women and men of a country that is not recognized as a country. The material comes from three trips to Palestine (between 2023 and 2026) and from the records that resulted from them — images, sounds, diaries, notebooks, memorabilia — as well as from the profound impact and transformation these journeys had on those who experienced them.