A film diary, in 15 short dispatches, from a place that both does and does not exist – a state in waiting, a geography beyond, but permanently besieged by, conflict, the sites of pressured being and the willed spaces of dream, desire, imagination and resistance. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Occupied Golan Heights as part of the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s ‘Ways of Traveling’ Residency 2020 – 2023 (inspired by the commitment of writer John Berger), here and not here marks the outcome of multiple creative collaborations and conversations. It seeks a poetics of expression that acknowledges the perennial challenges of Occupation while refusing the imposed, pejorative, partial and reductive mediatised definitions of a people under constant and escalating oppressions. Charting encounter – with and between people and place and the more than human – here and not here celebrates not the ‘cruel optimism’ of a false hope but rather celebrates the lived experience of a profoundly precious yet always precarious ‘everyday life’.
The film showed as part of the Gaza Biennial exhibition’s public programme in Istanbul, during October 2025.
