Beginning with a reimagining of the first minute of Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil, Specters of Home - Prologue is a short lyric film essay featuring a masculine voice narrating the writings of an unnamed female time traveler whose personal and family histories are fatefully entangled with the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948; the First Arab-Israeli War; and the Jewish Exodus from the Muslim World.

The film centers on the time traveler’s return to Jerusalem, the city of her birth, where she comes to learn the story of Yacoub Odeh, a Palestinian refugee from the village of Lifta, where the newly established State of Israel temporarily housed her great-grandparents as Jewish-Iraqi refugees in the 1950’s.

The project includes a wide range of visual materials including footage sourced from both family archives and the Israel Film Archive; ghostly renderings of Lifta’s extant architectural ruins created from 3D lidar data scans; and generative AI animations created in collaboration with artist Doug Rosman.

Funding for this project was generously provided by The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Kent State University, San Diego State University, and the Pratt Institute School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The film premiered on March 9, 2024, at The FRONT Arte y Cultura Gallery in San Diego, CA, as part of a group exhibition titled Invisible Traditions / Tradiciones Invisibles. The film had its New York City debut on April 2, 2024 at Pratt Institute as part of the AI in the Arts and Humanities symposium.

In 2025, Specters of Home - Prologue was selected to the 10th Beyond Borders | Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival in Greece. It has been screened at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY; Kent State University’s Design Innovation Hub; and the Electronic Literature Organization’s 25th Anniversary Festival at York University, Toronto, among others. The film was also curated as part of a film program titled CINE X MUJERES at the 8th Independent Film Festival of Mexico City and selected for inclusion in Engaging the Margins, a group exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine.

100% of proceeds generated by invitations to show the film are being donated to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

Further Reading

HereIn Interview about the film: https://www.hereinjournal.org/conversations/ava-aviva-avnisan-with-herein

Faculty Futures podcast conversation about the film: https://pod.fo/e/264196