SCREENING & DISCUSSION 

Sci-Fi Trilogy by Larissa Sansour 

presented by Joan Grandjean (in French) 

Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Zoom 

28.11.23, 12:45 - 2 pm GMT-5 

Given the ongoing crisis in Gaza, a team of students from UQAM's Art History Department is coordinating the event series “Pour une histoire de l'art engagée: Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” uniting artists and researchers whose endeavors center on highlighting the historical struggle of the Palestinian people. 
 
Joan Grandjean will present the Sci-Fi Trilogy directed by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. Under the common themes of loss, belonging, heritage and national identity, the three films A Space Exodus (2008), Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) each explore different aspects of the political turmoil the Middle East. While A Space Exodus envisions the final uprootedness of the Palestinian experience and takes the current political predicament to its extra-terrestrial extreme by landing the first Palestinian on the moon, Nation Estate reveals a sinister account of an entire population restricted to a single skyscraper, with each Palestinian city confined to a single floor. In the trilogy’s final instalment, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, a narrative resistance leader engages in archaeological warfare in a desperate attempt to secure the future of her people. Using the language of sci-fi and glossy production, Sansour’s trilogy presents a dystopian vision of a Middle East on the brink of the apocalypse.