Lyd: A Sci-fi Documentary

Synopsis (excerpted from lydinexile.com): Told from the perspective of the city herself, voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, this feature-length, sci-fi documentary shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the 5000-year-old city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred by Israeli forces, and most of the city’s 50,000 Palestinian residents were exiled. Using never-before-seen archival footage of the Israeli soldiers who carried out the massacre and expulsion, the city explains that these events were so devastating that they fractured her reality, and now there are two Lyds –– one occupied and one free. As the film unfolds, documentary portions follow a chorus of characters through their daily lives, creating a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city, and vivid animations use the language of speculative fiction to envision an alternate reality where the same documentary characters live free from the trauma of the past and the violence of the present.