The Retired Peasantry
Sarah Zeryab
2025
The Retired Peasantry is a short film which probes the fraught, triangular relationship between the camp, stolen land, and revolution, since it is land theft which produces the camp in the first place, and a revolution is needed to liberate the land from its thieves. Through the off-screen musings of two young men, the film traces a continuum of Palestinian dispossession, and the manner in which the subjecthood of the camp dweller metamorphoses from peasant, to revolutionary, to fugitive, to exile, to future returnee. Through this continuum, the film asks how practices of cultivation might inform modes of political life in the camp, a site defined precisely by the absence of land to cultivate. Indeed, the featured voices speak from this very absence, reflecting on how distance is measured between two non-existent points, and how lives are grounded in a state of systematic uprootedness. The camera pans through fleeting disparate landscapes that form an imagined terrain where living and working the land have always been inseparable from defending it. Here fugitives rush towards the setting sun, carrying time forward to reconfigure political futures back to liberation.
Sarah Zeryab (1991, Damascus, Syria) is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker whose practice navigates archival and militant sound and image across film, performance and listening formats. Through fragmented and non-linear compositions, she explores rupture, exile, and resistance, through collective histories of dispossession. Drawing on personal experience, her practice often engages with the temporality of place—particularly the Palestinian refugee camp, as a marker of stolen land and a site of revolution, a terrain where forms of potentiality emerge. Zeryab conceives the moving image as a continuum between absence and becoming, where incomplete liberation histories can surface and form anew.
Zeryab’s most recent work includes a video work titled The Retired Peasantry (2025) and a sonic piece titled “نحن لا نعترف” as part of the takeover ‘3ezwa’ (May 2025) via Refuge Worldwide, following earlier sound piece such as her (June 2024) ‘Savvyzaar meets radio Alhara’ mix.