Still Born

Using excerpts from my mother’s 2002 essay, “How To Be the Mother of a Stillborn Baby”, Still Born merges the comic form with animation in order to bring parallel realities and storylines into focus. The family’s personal tragedy is positioned within the wider context of life in the Palestinian diaspora to ask questions about loss, survival, collective memory and identity formation, of hope beyond hope, and the seemingly impossible challenge of letting go. What remains is a question: If one day, all our false nostalgias and imaginaries get up and walk away, is that a kind of liberation? What futures would we be free to imagine without the weight of all our ‘what ifs’ bearing down on our consciousness? This film was originally commissioned for the A.M. Qattan Foundation's 2018 Young Artist of the Year Award.