Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005)

Documentary, 51m

In 1963 Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet and filmmaker, ex-catholic and communist, went looking for signs of the divine in the villages, churches, and deserts of Palestine. He was at the same time searching the faces of its inhabitants for traces of the rustic piety that produced the Christian revolution, all the while recording his travels in a documentary of locations and scenarios for his planned film on the life of Jesus. Having found too few places untouched by the violence of modernity, Pasolini instead shot his Gospel According to Matthew in southern Italy.
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In a stuttering embrace of the holy fatherland and father Pasolini himself, Pasolini Pa* Palestine remakes Pasolini’s documentary, translating his script into Arabic and taking his film survey as a map for exploring contemporary Palestine. Reactivating Pasolini’s pursuit of the ‘archaic’ and the ‘sub-proletarian’ in a landscape cluttered with the markers of modern/colonial war and occupation, the video weaves together myth and document, the theological and the political, the messianic and the everyday.
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At once an exploration of artistic repetition and reenactment, and the scenario of production that lies at the margins of epic narrative, Pasolini Pa* Palestine is also a discerning investigation of the past as a motivating political force, revolutionary and otherwise, in the wreckage of the modern.

Director: Ayreen Anastas

From: Ayreen Anastas
Sent: Dec 2, 2003 4:22 PM
To: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Subject: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film “Vangelo Secondo Matteo”
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Dear Pier Paolo,
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I am writing to ask your permission to repeat your seeking in Palestine film 40 years ago in the film: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film ‘Vangelo Secondo Matteo’.*
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In this repetition, I would like to find in that landscape what you have not found in your film. Your refusal of the Palestinian landscape makes me sad: a refusal that is a negation and affirmation at the same time: it is a negation because you did not execute ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’ in Palestine, and an affirmation in the sense of the necessity of a repetition of this venture, trip, seeking etc… only in that gap of not finding the location in Palestine in your film 40 years ago, I can start seeking them in the new film today.
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So it is not a real sadness if I say: I am sad that you did not decide for this landscape and for locations there. It is rather a symbolic sadness, that will help me find an unnamable (an unknown that actually motivates the project) in that landscape I grew up in. It is a sadness of love, a double love, for you as a filmmaker and for this landscape.
(…)
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* Seeking Locations in Palestine for ‘The Gospel According to Matthew'”