Concept

This is a sixty-minute experimental film that I wrote and directed in Jerusalem in May 2016, upon invitation of the New Media Department of Musrara Art School.

The film is a performance-based production made of symbolic actions staged around the city, with the participation of local artists and performers, while visually strong imagery and guerrilla-like actions involved the community in a game of provocations on the theme of identity and belonging.

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To keep all these elements together, and at the same time address this problematic city with an original, not predictable or judgmental gaze, I decided to stage my very naivety, my ignorance, and my desire to discover beyond appearances.

I then triggered a surrealist narrative device: I am Dorothy Gale and I have just been thrown into this unknown place by a typhoon. I'm now looking for the Great and Powerful Oz who lives in the city of Emerald. The film is a performative guerrilla action that allowed me to create in the people I met an interesting process of suspension from reality and an invitation to play. But was it just a game? In fact, many people I spoke to, showing them my fantasy city map, reacted very seriously. Because in this city you can go around asking for magical places and great wizards, and be taken damn seriously.

Looking for Oz in the City of Gods.

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Through Mythology and Topology, Politics and Literature, magics and daily life, the sacred and the secular, a famous Bildungsroman (novel of formation), and my personal growth in the role of a grown-up Dorothy Gale, I overlapped a strange map conceived in a fantasy novel and the real disputed geography of the city.

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