A Stone's Throw

Amine, a Palestinian elder, was exiled from land and labour, moving from Haifa to Beirut and finally to an offshore oil platform in the Gulf. Trespassing geographic and historical borders, the film reveals an emotional and material proximity between regional oil extraction, migrant labour and the Zionist colonisation of Palestine.

Razan AlSalah: ‘During the pandemic, my brother and I wanted to have conversations with our dad to understand the material conditions of his labour on Zirku Island, an island in the Arab Gulf, off the shore of Abu Dhabi, a fenced-off work camp where around 1,100 male employees lived and worked 12[-hour-plus] shifts, often for extended and continuous periods of time. Growing up, “the island” was this obscure, mystical place that our dad disappeared to — and then came back from. So we were like: where is this place? What did you do there? What kind of work? What kind of conditions?We started recording these conversations, and at one point I told my dad, “It seems like this is going to be a film.” And he said, “No, you can’t make a film because you can’t bring a camera onto the island.” I was like, “You don’t know my work. If anything, I’m a certified expert for places where you can’t bring cameras.”And so the film very much became about trying to visualise the island — studying the images as another kind of border, another wall. How these images erase the bodies of the labourers, and how that erasure can be linked to the histories of Palestinian resistance to oil and gas as projects of colonisation.’— Excerpted from Nasrin Himada, ‘To Keep the Remembering Going: In Conversation with Filmmaker Razan AlSalah’, Public Parking, 20 May 2025.