Ouroboros is the first feature film by artist Basma Alsharif, shot between 2015 and 2016 in Matera, Bretagne and Los Angeles, for which i worked on field recording. It was shot by filmmaker Ben Russell and featured artist Diego Marcon as the main actor. Ouroboros has been selected for Whitney Biennial 2017 and for Locarno Film Festival 2017.

 

“Death as birth, history as the present, the end as the beginning.

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.

By challenging the aestheticism in the representation of trauma, Ouroboros’ goal is not only to change our vision of cinema but also to open up a new chapter in our way of seeing the Middle-East. This is a film about the future.”