Via Dolorosa

What narratives escape the frame of war, and how do those bearing witness, in turn, consume media? Offing, re-focuses the lens on the tender and the mundane as acts of life, and re-centers relationality as a way into the unrenderable essence of sound and subjectivity. Employing the spoken online voice of artist Salman Nawati, against footage shot by Toukan outside of Gaza, the film departs from the summer 2021 war on Gaza.

Palace of the Slave departs from the open mouth of a sculpted lion and a cub’s gaze. It takes a Hellenic ruin in Jordan to compare pixel to strata and to analyze the mechanics of gazing at the digital representation of ruin, via historical record.

Based on Skype conversations with Gaza-based photographers, fixers, and drivers who were behind specific images that were transmitted from screen to screen in the summer of 2014. The film probes the face of mourning and grief – its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks how the gaze gets channeled within the digital realm, and how empathy travels. Equally, how the documentary signifier – and its abstraction – operate when viewing suffering. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’ – and how many meters or kilometers is that? What is the behavior and political economy of the image of war? Who is the ‘local’ in the representation of war? What is the daily routine of those who represent war?