Nobody Owns The Sea (2020) dir. Alicia Mersy

LebaneseFrenchCanadian artist Alicia Mersy has described technology as a way to see ourselves from outside of our mind, body, emotions, and ideologies. She puts these ideas into practice through the moving and immediate Nobody Owns the Sea, a freeflowing record of Mersys conversations with two teenage boys living in Palestine. Mersy was working in Ramallah as a video activist when she met the films subjects, Athar and Hakeem Barghouti. I asked if they could take me to the top of a building so I could take a close shot of this huge poster of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian resistant, and they said: You want a photo of our uncle she recalled in an interview with Mille. After this coincidental meeting, the three continued talking in the mountains overlooking the West Bank; in the final film, their chat is wideranging, addressed directly to Mersys camera with an understated trust.