An homage to Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989), inspired by Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. From the Old Masters wing of the Gothenburg Museum of Art, it reflects on the genocide in Gaza. (This film is screened with Morning Circle and Home Movies Gaza.)

A man walks through a museum. The camera follows behind him in a tracking shot, slowly traversing a space layered with histories of imperial collecting and power. Referencing Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989) and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), the film draws on their long takes and sustained movement to create a sense of violence that remains largely unseen. Images of the genocide in Gaza are superimposed upon the orderly galleries of the Gothenburg Museum of Art, where canonical works are displayed. A space conventionally associated with preservation and the sublime can no longer appear neutral.
Al-Sharif twists the museum as an institution of memory, filled with monuments and masterpieces, to ask what is preserved as history and what is erased. If the two Elephant films explored how violence persists and recurs within everyday life, Old Masters extends that question toward the politics of images and memory. Violence that does not occur directly within the frame instead permeates the space through the form of absent images. Situated in the gap between art and history, preservation and forgetting, the film asks us to reconsider the power of images—and the responsibilities they carry.

• Screenplay Basma al-SHARIF
• Cinematography Josef GÖTHERSKJÖLD
• Edit Basma al-SHARIF
• Sound Josef GÖTHERSKJÖLD
• Music Gregor QUENDEL
• Cast Diego MARCON, Federico CHIARI

Basma al-SHARIF | Basma al-SHARIF | basmalsharif@gmail.com