As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night
Directed by Søren Lind, Larissa Sansour21m[Drama](/on-demand/category/drama), [Short](/on-demand/category/short)
8.1
As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night lends an untraditional form to Sansour's exploration of inherited trauma and epigenetics. At its centre is an Arabic-language opera about trauma, loss, and mourning, seen in a black-and-white three-screen projection, arranged like an altar triptych. The aria is performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish and composed by the Lebanese composer Antony Sahyoun. It is based on the Austrian Gustav Mahler's composition Kindertotenlieder and the traditional Palestinian song Al Ouf Mash'al. Kindertotenlieder, which premiered in 1905, set to music a group of poems written by the poet Friedrich Rückert after the death of his two children. In Al Ouf Mash'al, a Palestinian woman mourns the loss of her lover, who was recruited into the Ottoman army in World War I. The aria blends together two different musical traditions, weaving a beautiful lament for more than a hundred years of grief. Filmed in a derelict chapel, the opera juxtaposes computer generated imagery and archival footage of the First World War. As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night uses documentary material from the Imperial War Museum in London, including scenes from Palestine at the start of the British Mandate and from the struggles against the Ottoman Empire. In the opera's final scene, the singer immerses herself in an indigo pool, changing the colour of her white dress into the shade of blue historically associated with mourning in Palestine. Indigo is physically longer lasting than other pigments and like grief, it stands the test of time. The world of the opera flows from the chapel into the exhibition room in the form of an installation surrounded by indigo curtains, with silent tree trunks resembling dismembered bodies hanging over the pool on chains from the ceiling.
