Razan AlSalah, A Stone’s Throw, 2024. Digital video. Courtesy of the artist.
Grief is a Scene
The first time I saw A Stone’s Throw by Razan Al-Salah it was screening at Prismatic Ground in New York City. I’m there with my best friend, settling in with snacks and drinks, eager for the screening to begin. I spot Razan in the aisles, chatting with some friends. She walks toward me to take the empty seat next to mine, planning to sit beside her former graduate supervisor, but I ultimately benefited from this choice. Watching Razan’s film for the first time while sitting next to her added something deeply transformative to this experience.
I express this here because, it turns out, our life stories are so similar, and our families' migration narratives run parallel. The experience of the screening felt magnetic. I felt pulled into a universe only known by the ones who fought, dreamed, danced, and sang for our land. As two Palestinians who love film and are in the throes of experiencing life after October 7th, there couldn’t have been a more profound moment to deepen this heart-feeling I have—what I imagine as a collective power shared among us Palestinians and the feeling that this power is ultimately shaped by our relations (whether we know each other or not) and our deep love for our land (whether we’ve been there or not). It felt as though Razan and I understood certain things in silence and through tears as we watched her beautiful film.
I felt our bond deepen through this shared understanding of each other’s grief—a connection that could only have been felt because we were sitting next to each other. I was feeling a kind of poetic awakening throughout the screening as I sat there in my favourite architecture (the cinema), with someone I hardly knew but who felt so familiar. And as I came to write this text, months later, it struck me: if filmmakers are the poets of light, and light is what makes an image appear, then grief is a scene where light dreams.
That day, something came alive in the cinema, almost as if it were an extension of the film itself—as if the border of the frame collapsed, and the life of the images breathed into the space between us. Perhaps it was the affect of utterance—the act of telling the story of liberation through the layering of many image compositions, and through the story of a rebellion—dissolving the borders that nearly separated us long ago, before we were born.
I sat down with Razan in December, talking to her through the screens in our respective homes. We spoke for just over an hour about the burden of representation, the troubling dichotomy between the material and immaterial, the limitations and bare necessities that drive process, the movement of water as an anti-colonial force, the process of a filmic technique I had never heard of, the collapse of borders through image work, and the body as land. A lot—we spoke of a lot. And in our speaking, And in our speaking, I could feel the beginnings of a language remembered from long ago, one that refuses separation and knows of unspoken relations, a language born of a future we’ve already known.
We spoke of the sound of water, the phytograms that the film starts us off with, how the first frame already introduces us to the materiality of exposure and the manipulation of celluloid as processual—leading to a drive through the streets of Beirut, followed by a scan over the map of Abu Dhabi. Razan sets us up in several geographies by using mapping technologies in a way that softens this mechanical, dissociated eye. Reflecting on this softening, Razan expressed:
Something about my initial approach of studying images became too materialist and too obsessed with images themselves and the border itself that it wasn’t allowing any space for: where is the breath, where is the line of flight out of this? Where is the glitch in the image? Where is the break? I also started listening more to Amine [Razan’s father and the subject in the film] and what he was trying to tell me. “I remember Haifa as water,” he recalled. “On the island, after a 12-hour shift in the sun, I would throw my body in the water.” Growing up in Beirut, I would always look at the horizon and think about what my dad had told me about Haifa and the water. Somehow, I imagined the horizon as a kind of quantum encounter—his eyes looking out from Haifa’s shore and mine meeting them from Beirut.
Watching A Stone’s Throw solidified even deeper my love for film and its ability to return us to our bodies, which means returning us to our land. In this insistence, I return to a foundational ethic instilled in me by my parents: always remember where you come from. And as I continue to move through these cycles of colonial violence, remembering is not just about reciting stories or keeping memories sharp; it’s about the knowing of how deeply cellular this feeling is, and it's in places like the cinema that I continue to be reminded of it, and its aliveness in my body. "We have to return to keeping that feeling activated," I said to Razan, describing it as both immaterial and profoundly material, a contradiction that she had also named when explaining the foundational framework of her own process.
Razan critiques the extremes of positivism and abstraction, suggesting that collapsing the binary itself might offer a way to reframe these forces. "You’re right," she responded "about the body as land…and each time I show the film, I have people coming up to me and telling me they felt like they could touch the image.” She goes on to explain how in these filmic spaces where we are completely detached—like Google Earth and satellite imagery—the two-dimensional visuals are manipulated to feel immersive, but they end up doing the opposite, creating a distanced, almost God-like perspective. “This approach feels inherently colonial,” she remarks. “True embodiment doesn’t work when it relies on a mechanical, extractive relationship with images or land.”
“Believe in the process,” Razan expressed, suggesting a way out of the colonial mindset of predetermining a vision of what something might lead to, akin to surveying land. The incredible water-like rhythm of A Stone’s Throw, induced by sound, but also by how the image is composed, might make us feel that we can touch the image. Not only that; we have been guided into a world that opens up onto borderless movement, layering multiple pathways that integrate Amine’s story of migration, survival, steadfastness, and his love for Haifa—his Haifa as water, as he remembers—into scenes of trespass, reclamation, and revolution.
“I’m learning to listen more to my dad because this is the first time I’m working with a main subject. I’m also paying attention to his body, as there’s so much that is composed from how he speaks. There’s something lyrical and poetic in the way he shares his stories— his body and movements offer something different. Watching how he travels the city made me realize this, and from there I learned I should pick up a camera and start filming, as that is another way of trespassing.”
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian curator and writer. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long term friendships and by their many on-going collaborations with artists, filmmakers and poets. Nasrin’s ongoing project, For Many Returns, experiments with writing as an act dictated by love, and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire as transformation, and liberation through many forms. Nasrin currently holds the position of Associate Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Razan is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. Razan’s moving images are ghostly trespasses and seeping ruptures of the colonial image that function as another border, another wall. She thinks of her creative process as a collective recollection in a circle of relations with each other and the unknown. Razan’s films have screened at festivals including Palestine Cinema Days (Sunbird Award for Best Short, 2017), RIDM (Best National Short or Medium Length Film, 2024), Beirut International Film Festival, Gabes Cinema Fen, Prismatic Ground, BlackStar Film Festival, Doclisboa and Open City Docs among others. She teaches film at Concordia University.