Een mysterieuze rit door het verlaten landschap van het schiereiland Sinaï onder leiding van een groep handeldrijvende bedoeïenen. Habib Allah volgt hen over de grenzen van de militaire controleposten, naar een woestijn die politiek, economisch en historisch van de landkaart valt, een plaats waar deze buitenstaanders in alle stilte hun leven verderzetten. Verhalen, reisroutes, richtingen en verbintenissen worden zo wazig als het statuut van de bedoeïenen zelf, die niet-erkende non-burgers blijven van dit niemandsland.

Atomic Park is a place in the White Sands desert (New Mexico), not far away from Trinity Site, where the first atom bomb exploded in july 1945. This national park provides an ambivalent landscape, as well suited for a picknick as for ballistic tests. A white desert, like a natural exhibition hall, in which every presence, every movement can provoke diverse interpretations. Like a faint echo we hear Marilyn Monroe’s desperate monologue and accusation about man's violence from the Misfits.

Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape. 

Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Chile and Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes, coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, blue whales, and more. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.

And still, it remains tells the story of Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara and home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Surrounded by ancient rock art, the area was also the site of French nuclear bombs between 1961-66 and continues to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout circulating in the water and soil. Summoning the landscape as a witness and protagonist; experiences of French nuclear experiments, faith and justice are narrated by the voices of multiple residents. By affording the residents distance from the lens, the film also pushes against forms of visual capture that reproduce a colonial gaze and challenges visibility as the currency for political redress. Winds migrating across the Sahara have recently carried sand containing nuclear remains back to France – a reminder that the environmental afterlives of colonialism cannot be contained or forgotten.