Project Detail

As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night

Synopsis

An Arabic-language opera about mourning and inherited trauma. Performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish, it fuses Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Masha’al, a traditional Palestinian song.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023 - International premiere

Details

Year
2022
Type of project
Shorts
Running time
21 mins
Format
three-channel video work
Director
Larissa Sansour, Soren Lind
Producer
Ali Roche
Screenwriter
Soren Lind
Language Note
In Arabic with English subtitles

Production Status

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.

In Vitro In Vitro

Director: Larissa Sansour, Soren Lind

Year: 2019

A sci-fi short set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder is on her deathbed, as her young successor, who is born underground, comes to visit her. The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and inherited trauma. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Official Short Film Competition - Experimenta Strand

Body, Remember... Body, Remember...

Director: Matthew Berka

Year: 2026

After C. P. Cavafy. Dedicated to the body, to remembering, to forgetting. When blinded, the senses can cross-pollinate so that they become more closely bonded. Likewise, they can also disassociate and lose contact with each other. Desire transforms things into other things. The erotics of absence and suggestion direct attention away from the materialism of pornography. Longing is described through cinematic space as distance and proximity. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

走 (zǒu) 走 (zǒu)

Director: Hannah Wu

Year: 2025

"A journey through the pages of my mother’s old Chinese-English dictionary, featuring tigers, socialists and roundabouts." An experimental animated short about language, meaning and moving through the world (one drawing at a time). Combining ink drawings on paper with direct animation on 35mm film, various definitions of the Chinese character for ‘walk’ take on meanings in turn literal, historical, personal and abstract.