Safe to assume the ongoing atrocities in Gaza will engender cinema, fiction and documentary alike, further into the future than we can imagine. Decades of aggression have yielded, in just this last year, the TIFF selection Alam and Berlinale winner No Other Land; if what absurd, horrific controversy the latter quickly engendered is any indication, the industry faces many moments of reckoning. It remains to be seen what, if any, attention comes from Lyd, a “sci-fi documentary” that examines the eponymous city––once Palestinian, now Israeli, and since 1948 a site of considerable exile and strife––from its imagined perspective. Ahead of an April 26 engagement that starts at New York’s Firehouse Cinema, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the trailer.
Here’s the synopsis for Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland’s film: “Lyd is a speculative feature-length documentary that follows the rise and fall of Lyd – a 5,000-year-old metropolis that was once a bustling Palestinian town until it was conquered when the State of Israel was established in 1948. As the film unfolds, a chorus of characters creates a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city and the trauma left by the massacre and expulsion, while vivid animations envision an alternate reality where the same characters live free from the trauma of the past and the violence of the present. As the film cuts between fantastical and documentary realities, it ultimately leaves the viewer questioning which future should prevail. Lyd dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?”
Find preview and poster below:
