Based on a series of images of the city after sunset, Shadi Habib Allah’s film 30kg Shine (2015) weaves three stories together over the course of eight minutes. The theme that connects them is darkness.

In this non-linear film, we see the underground site of the catacombs that Israel is currently constructing. Habib Allah shows close-ups of a dripping mass and lets us listen in on the occasional overheard conversations of construction workers. The artist gives this unearthly phenomenon a horror-story interpretation. The third story shows an older woman moving through her house at night by candlelight due to hostile Israeli neighbours and the unreliable power supply of the old city centre.

As a whole, 30kg Shine is a comment on Palestine and the Israeli State (as well as on the state Israel is in), on a territory where politics is linked with fear, where the notion of ‘property’ is fundamentally questioned and where the burial of the dead is made an argument for an eternal claim to the land. When the bodies of your ancestors are resting beneath the soil, what question can there be of whose land it is?

Part of NORMAL SCHNORMAL, a multidisciplinary programme on normality and other deviations.