Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba

The film imagines a century after the Nakba, as a deceased grandmother navigates her hometown Haifa through Google Street View — the only remaining way to see Palestine. Her disembodied voice wanders digital streets, searching for a son born in 1948, and for a geography erased from history yet preserved through spectral imagination.

Razan Alsalah: ‘With Google Street View, I view images as walls, because when I first started making Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba, I had this naïve understanding of the digital promise of this kind of photorealism. Then, as soon as I did an interview with my dad and tried to geolocate the street where my father was born, I realised that the image is actually another wall. There’s the digital divide. All this comes to make up this “image world” that is colonial in its modes of production.Therefore, I approach this in two different ways. First, I leaned into the points where the image breaks: the glitches, the copyright in the sky, and the empty faces. It is important that I focus on how the traces in the image remind us of the constructedness of the image. In another way, I needed to break the smoothness of this kind of God-like positionality temporally as well, by slowing down or adding breath. In this way the digital becomes embodied and becomes manual.’