ARCHIPEL

archipelago

At night, the young Palestinian Abed illegally enters West Jerusalem through the sewer system, going under the wall which divides the city. He works in a restaurant with Claudia, who becomes the protagonist of the story, half dream and half tale, with which he entertains his colleagues as they smoke the last cigarette of the evening. On his day off, he decides to return home with a white box. By bus and on foot, he crosses the hills under a cloudy sky; it is going to be a long journey for Abed.

“I wanted to tell the everyday story of a man on the move who is forced to continuously try and find new ways to get in and out of the city, until he finally gets lost in a territory he himself no longer recognizes. Archipel ignores the present political partition of the territory (the Palestinian Territories and Israel are never named) and shows the constraints, the difficulties of a new and mysterious path, without making it spectacular. There is nothing extraordinary in how oppression is organized.” 

regia, sceneggiatura, montaggio, produttore/director, screenplay, film editing, producer

Giacomo Abbruzzese

fotografia/cinematography

Blaise Basdevant

musica/music

Alessandro Altavilla

suono/sound

Nicolas Verhaeghe

interpreti/cast

Abdel Razaq Abu Meizer, Riyad Deis, Yaniv Lachman, Adi Gilat, Manar Harb

produzione, vendita all’estero/production, world sales

Le Fresnoy

coproduttore/coproducer

Ehab Assal

coproduzione/coproduction

Yellow Dawn Production