In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain
January 23rd 2017 @ 7:30 p.m. 
A4 Space, Al Serkal Avenue, Dubai
Directed by Larissa Sansour
Short / Arabic / 2015 / 29 minutes

This short will be screened in conjunction with the film Samia. 

In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands.

​Seating is on a first come, first served basis, so please come early to reserve your seat and avoid dissapointment!

Artist's Statement: Larissa Sansour

Central to my practice is the tug and pull between fiction and reality in a Middle Eastern context. In several pieces over the past years, I have been exploring not only the sci-fi genre, but also the comic book superhero. Both forms have an inherent ability to communicate the most fundamental ambitions of a people or a civilization in a way that is naturally inspired by, but never hampered or restricted by a non-fictional reality.
Also, despite its high production value and glossy imagery, sci-fi tends to allow for a specific kind of almost nostalgia framing of the topic at hand. Even the slickest sci-fi almost invariably carries within it a sense of retro, ideas of the future tend to appear standard and cliché at the same time as they come across as visionary.
In the case of Palestine, there is an eternal sense of forecasting statehood, independence and the end of occupation. The ambitious ideas that we hope to achieve have long since become so repetitive that the odd mix of nostalgia and accomplishment that the scifi genre often embodies lends it itself well to the topic.