Conversation & Screening

Screening of Moonscape by Mona Benyamin followed by a conversation with Tali Keren

Tue, Mar 28, 2023

6:30 PM–8:00 PM

Free and Open to All. Proof of Covid vaccination or a negative test is required.

Register here.

Moonscape* (single channel video, 17 minutes) is a short film that takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle-of-the-road song, performed as a duet between a male and female singer, in Arabic. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons and makes a connection between his story and that of the director’s – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible.

The visuals of the film are a hybrid of surrealist scenes from the Arab music industry, reenacted by the artist’s parents, who also play the roles of the singers in the film, and film noir; in addition to found footage from the NASA archives, references from canonic films which influenced the art world and show representations of the Moon, and screenshots of Email correspondences with staff members of the Lunar Embassy. All in order to explore the relationship between hope, nostalgia, and despair.

*A moonscape is an area or vista of the lunar landscape (generally of the Earth’s moon) or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term “moonscape” is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war, often by shelling.