Like Twenty Impossibles
كأننا عشرون مستحيل
Like Twenty Impossibles (Ka'inana Ashrun Mustaheel)
Occupied Palestine: A serene landscape now pockmarked by military checkpoints. When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people.
short film, Annemarie Jacir, Palestine 2003, 17 min, 35mm or digital, colour, Arab./Engl. with Engl. ST, various additinal languages available
Cast Reem Abu-Sbaih, Ismail Dabbagh, Raja’ Khateeb, Rami Mussalem, Shadi Zumorrod, Ashraf Abu Moch | Director of Photography Phillipe Bellaiche | Musical Score Kamran Rastegar | Sound Design Bill Toles | Edited, Directed and Produced by Annemarie Jacir
From the press
Succint and powerful (Film Comment)
Like the politics it discusses, it is resolutely, and brilliantly, inconclusive. (Time Out)
Like twenty impossibles is grippingly suspenseful while also satirizing the power imbalances inherent in political filmmaking. (Filmmaker)
Compared in some quarters to Pontecorvo's also pseudo-documentary The Battle of Algiers, this is obviously more compact and yet, in its necessary absence of character development and visual brutality, equally devasting in condemnation. (Blue Jai Arts)
festivals/distinctions | film-maker Annemarie Jacir | background material
buy the DVD
To acquire the rights for classroom screenings or libraries, please place your request here.