Spaces Elsewhere

I couldn’t stop thinking about Al Basateen (2025). As a Taiwanese person that just voted pro-China lawmakers out at the end of July, I’ve long carried an underlying fear of losing my homeland to our ambitious neighbor. In Al Basateen, former residents of the Basateen al-Razi district reclaim narrative and spatial agency after losing their home. They replicate the government’s urban redevelopment plan in 3D then graffiti rebellion slogans everywhere. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about Al Basateen because it made me reflect on my own experience living in suburban America, where landscapes operate like a copy-paste function: chain stores, identical houses, wide roads with no pedestrians. Clean, functional, but nothing is built. 

Why do we build or rebuild a place in cinema? 

The Soviet Union killed the youngest desert in the world. We meditate with the saxaul tree and truly mourn the vanishing of the Aral Sea in Aralkum (2022), an uncommon attentiveness in a time where people don’t mourn the past because they’ve lost it — they mourn because they’re stuck in its performance, rehearsing victimhood. In Quneitra, Syria,  a cinema house survived after Israel’s 1973 attack — one of the few structures in the area still standing today. Omar Amiraly noted that Israel left Quneitra as an open wound, so people would remember how barbaric they can be. That movie house gave me hope and reminded me of a seam pulling tight under new skin.

Hiroshi Sugimoto once pointed his camera at a movie screen and exposed the film for the entire duration of the movie. The result was a photograph where the screen appears blank and glowing.

(I imagine cinema is [         ].)

So the Chilean children in One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (1988) are able to step into that blank space. They meet cinema the way one meets a stranger — suddenly, and with no preface. Their first film coincides with their first day in a film class. In the age of streaming, such an experience is almost unthinkable, like hearing a language for the first time and grasping its meaning in the same breath. Such purity is scarce in a world drowning in moving images. And yet, the circumstance feels cruel — the only reason these children could have this first encounter is that war had prevented cinema from ever becoming ubiquitous.

Cinema has been a verb, a journey into landscapes we have never set foot in.

(Why do we build or rebuild a place in a cinema?) 

A faithful devotee seeks nothing from God. The conqueror seeks only what can be taken, bending for rivers it can dam and drain. Empires sow fields with the dead, until flesh turns to soil, blood to rivers, and the sea becomes a mirror of their dominion. Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Christopher Radcliff arrived — in Moune Ô, in We Were the Scenery — to stand witness. Sometimes rebuilding is not about geography or space, but about reclaiming bodies, memories, and existence that have been turned into landscape.

(I imagine cinema is  █  █  █  █  █  █  █  █ )

To rebuild a space in cinema is to lay bricks with memory, to mortar them with the dust of what is gone. Walls breathe. Corridors carry absence and presence in the same air. Sometimes they speak in testimony, when history has left no images; sometimes they invent, so that loss can be made visible. In their shadows, empires crumble again; in their light, the vanished becomes navigable. We build —not to return, but to make a place where the past stands beside us. 

        __________________________Films Cited____________________________

        |                                                               Al Basateen (2025)                                                          | 

       |                                                             Aralkum (2022)                                                                 |

        |                                                     A Plate of Sardines (1997)                                                       |

       |                                        One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (1988)                              |

                          |                                                               Moune Ô (2022)                                                               |                   

                                |                                                We Were the Scenery (2025)                                                         |                       

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By Chen-Yi Wu