Review: We Began By Measuring Distance • The Story of Milk and Honey • Home Movies Gaza • Wawa – BFMAF 2024

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We Began By Measuring Distance (2009)

I make a point of knowing as little about any work of performance or filmed art before taking a seat in the stalls. How then to speak of such an abstract construction as Basma al-Sharif’s We Began By Measuring Distance? On one level there’s the unidentified, dispassionate voice narrating a tale of anonymous, bored cartographers setting out to define the world through measurement. Amongst their discoveries is that a 360-degree circle measures 360 degrees and that there is no single distance between Jerusalem and Gaza.

The assembled footage meanwhile shifts between suffering & military atrocities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, natural history, and two anorak-wearing figures in a park holding up a sheet upon which the cartographers’ various measurements are projected. It’s oddly fascinating, not least due to the narrator’s deep, mesmeric cadence, and the unpredictable visuals swerving between the absurd and the tragic. Perhaps al-Sharif is commenting on the uselessness of facts and figures to relay Palestinian suffering, and perhaps there is a deeper significance to the ‘numerology’ playing out on screen.

Perhaps. In a sense, We Began By Measuring Distance feels like an anti-documentary, and though interesting and thought-provoking does ultimately suffer from its deliberate obscurity.

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The Story of Milk and Honey (2011)

The second in this quadruple bill, The Story of Milk and Honey finds a younger Basma al-Sharif in a more surreal than abstract frame of mind. Here, a warm-voiced narrator, Mahmoud Chrieh, details their attempt to create a love story set in the Middle East ‘devoid of political context’. As films go, it is abstemious with actual footage, much of its 9-minute run-time left to the voice, and a black screen alone due to the narrator’s ultimate failure.

The love story cannot be written, such is the confounding context of place, history, and above all nationalism. Visuals, where they are permitted, follow the narrator’s attempts to distil truths shorn of individuality, anonymising holiday photos, and stripping the names of plants from botanical texts. There’s an undeniable sophistication to the work, sufficient to keep the audience’s attention even when the film’s thesis defies easy interpretation.

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Home Movies Gaza (2013)

Home Movies Gaza begins with an extended shot from a car window, whilst driving through that scarred city and down to the Meditteranean shore. It becomes clear that it’s being played in reverse, backpack-wearing schoolkids, and donkey-pulled wagons all travelling backwards. Cutting to a voice-over plucked from Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the scene briefly shifts to Director Basma al-Sharif’s living room elsewhere, before resuming the ride-along.

The film’s thesis is far clearer than the prior two examples of her work, though precisely why free-range poultry are painted in psychedelic exposure post-production eludes me. Something is being said, but one suspects some explanatory context from the film’s maker is needed to unpick it. In contrast, a scene featuring one teenager’s painful Cello practice whilst bombs fall outside smashes ordinary domesticity against bloody conflict with jarring immediacy. Life, al-Sharif seems to say, goes on in Gaza – this isn’t a nation on a war footing, but a people trying to find normality amidst captive persecution.

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Wawa (2014)

There’s something rather friendly about Sky Hopkina’s Wawa, a palimpsest of sorts, layering various encounters with the Chinuk Wawa language, one upon the other. The subtitles are the star here, conventional at first but escalating into a morass of clauses and possible interpretations as the short advances. Between this text, Hopkina’s experiences in a Chinuk Wawa class and his interview with older academic Henry Zenk, the audience glimpses the language on its own terms.

The inseparability of language and society is central, the two creating and created by, communities and cultures. Wawa does provoke curiosity, but this short feels more akin to a trailer for Hopkina’s work than a main course.

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General Comment

Within the world of film, there are shorts, and there are shorts. Some stand alone, whilst others, such as the four in this showcase, need context to fully crystalise their meanings. Each would be better encountered within an exhibition to lead the viewer into the experience. As such, individual star ratings are of no relevance and are not applied.

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Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) takes place every March. For more information on the Festival, click here.

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