Aïnata
Alaa Mansour
2018
Aïnata, is an attempt to deconstruct the hegemonic historical and political narratives of wars and victories by excavating lands of resistance and liberation. Through the use of archives and the process of editing, the film unfolds into a multi-layered exploration of micro-histories, revealing a dissonant account of the complex interpretations relating to symbols of martyrdom and revolution. With its hybrid approach, the film oscillates between an oneiric drifting of the imaginary and the perpetual signs of ideology and conflicts.
Maybe that place doesn’t even exist. Maybe it only exists in an imaginary film that remains unresolved. At first, there is a withering memory. There is a desire to form a landscape in ruins. Scattered memory, scattered dream, my journey starts upon a loss that arises from the tremor of fantasy. Here we are in Aïnata in south Lebanon, a place where the Eye follows the stream to its source, where the tales from the land of Ugarit intertwine with our modern rituals and myths. I try to define a point of view, to recast the whole from a detail, to map out one’s own space. History is to be told, and its stories unfold into a territory, where the archeology of times owes its survival to fiction.
The Mad Man’s Laughter
Alaa Mansour
2021
The Mad Man’s Laughter engages with the simulacrum of the so-called global war on terror, and the worlds of ubiquitous surveillance and simulations it has since spawned. By exploring the fictitious entities that are at play in the military-entertainment complex, the video embarks on a journey across artefacts and precepts shaped by modalities of power and control. Through the use of archival material and computer generated imagery, sounds, and texts, we navigate both latent and visible spaces of violence carved by colonial-militaristic image production and the data used to generate algorithmic biases.