The Way to Palestine (1985)
Directed by Layaly Badr
Produced by PLO Film Unit
In Layaly Badr’s documentary short, Road to Palestine, seven-year-old Layla – who has been badly injured in an air raid – lives in a refugee camp outside Palestine. Layla and her friends describe how they imagine Palestine, despite never having seen it.
“An animated short film for children. The film is based on the testimony of the girl Laila, who saw some planes while her mother was combing her hair. She looked up at the sky and shouted to her mother, “the planes are sending balloons”. In actual fact, they were thermal balloons, falling directly to their target.“
After each interview, I write The In-Between. It’s a space to pull out a few threads from the episode and talk about them a little more. This week following our interview with @foreversean - a brief exploration of animation GOATS Amy Lockhart & Paperrad, LA DIY spaces, the early Simpsons seasons, and Freddy Got Fingered.
Link in bio! Episode out now in all places that lives.
Walk for Walk by Amy Lockhart @amy_logheart
Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese with Walk for Walk audio overlaid.
Oh, I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.
You go to your little desk and draw - what? A cute, hand drawn experimetal gif because you like the vibe.” You think you’re making something original, something untainted by the industry machine. But what you don’t realize is that the aesthetic you so blithely call experimental was, in fact, carefully constructed for you by a handful of people in the mid-twentieth century- people like Robert Russett and Cecile Starr, whose book Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art defined what non-commercial motion could even mean.
So that charmingly “imperfect” paper cut-out you posted on Instagram yesterday? That was already circulating back in 2004. It trickled down through festivals, journals, diy microcinemas, until, eventually, it made its way into your YouTube likes, where you no doubt thought you’d discovered something.
It’s sort of comical, really, how you think you’ve made something radical, when in fact you’re just reproducing a gesture that was theorized, catalogued, and canonized decades ago. From a pile of stuff.
