45th Parallel
Synopsis
Filmed on location to activate the legal and symbolic potential of the site, 45th PARALLEL unfolds as a monologue in five acts, performed by acclaimed filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel. The story centres on Hernández vs. Mesa, a judicial case covering the fatal shooting in 2010 of an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national by a US Border Patrol agent. At the supreme court Mesa’s bullet, which crossed the US/Mexico border, began to implicate missiles fired in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya. If this murder could be tried in the US, so too could 91,340 drone strikes.
Official Selection New York Film Festival 2022 - World premiere
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023
Details
- Year
- 2022
- Type of project
- Shorts
- Running time
- 15 min
- Format
- Video and two painted backdrops
- Director
-
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
- Producer
- Luke W. Moody
- Director of Photography
- Jarred Alterman
- Principal cast
- Mahdi Fleifel
Genre
Production Status
Production Company
Sales Company
Page updates
This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.
See also
You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.
Spacewoman
Director: Hannah Berryman
Year: 2024
A landmark feature documentary about astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command the Space Shuttle. Eileen’s incredible journey starts with her smalltown beginnings, sees her smash through many glass ceilings, and culminates in four dramatic space shuttle missions, the last being possibly the most dangerous and most important of them all. At its heart the film is the moving human drama of one family, where a mother’s extraordinary career takes us straight to the big philosophical question of what is the level of acceptable risk in human endeavour? This film celebrates Commander Collins’ trailblazing NASA career which opened the way for women to become spacecraft pilots and commanders, and proved a perfect riposte to a previous generation of male astronauts who thought there was no place for women to lead the way in space. Official Selection DOC NYC 2024 - World premiere Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - European premiere
Elegy for the Lost
Director: William Hong-xiao Wei
Year: 2025
Through the psychoanalytic and introspective voiceover of a young post-pandemic Chinese migrant in Europe, the film interweaves her private memories of intimacy with public narratives of resistance. As her reflections unfold, she and her community navigate secrecy, repression, survival, looming precarity, and displacement, all while confronting the personal cost of existing in a world that demands their silence.
Third Person (Plural)
Director: Aikaterini Gegisian
Year: 2023
A cinematic essay composed of over 200 postwar U.S. informational films and newsreels from the Library of Congress and the National Archives. What begins as an inquiry into America’s vision of early European integration becomes a feminist re-reading of the masculine gaze that shaped the postwar world. Through archival images once used to define ‘the global’ and ‘the other,’ the film exposes the links between Hollywood, propaganda, and the military-industrial complex in constructing Western modernity. By casting a female gaze on these histories, THIRD PERSON (PLURAL) challenges the authority of the archive and reveals the unseen many who inhabit it - the collective ‘third person’ who looks back at the camera.