On Refusal and Resistance
A new commissioned text by Dr Róisín Tapponi
In the films of Nada El-Omari, the image does not represent reality. It abstracts it, fractures its popular associations, and reorganises its terms of perception. Footage accumulates and obscures. Landscapes overlay other landscapes. Geography refuses containment. Poetry appears, in subtitled form, atop everyday conversations. Working at the faultline between intimacy and ideology, the Montreal-based artist of Palestinian and Egyptian origin constructs a cinema of formal, linguistic and intergenerational layers. Her filmography shows how diasporic memory can be visually constructed when land, family and language converge onscreen. In doing so, footage shifts from a means of documentation to a medium of afterimage: the Palestine viewed in El-Omari’s family archives can no longer be directly accessed, but insists on reproducing in an alternative, experimental form.
El-Omari’s cinema is less concerned with representation than with surface: what leaks through it, what refuses to settle. The surface is never transparent. It is sedimented. It bears traces. In Yaffa (2019), text wipes across the bodies of women, the sea, and the screen’s skin. El-Omari’s recurring use of superimposition and multiple exposures creates a typically surreal effect. The sea, filmed so closely that it loses horizon and scale, becomes a texture that resists cartographic certainty. After all, the filmmaker herself was not present in the landscape of Yaffa; the footage is credited to her family members. This is a Jaffa of post-production. This is a Jaffa of El-Omari’s dreams. This is a way of insisting that history, too, must be passed down intergenerationally, and re-seen from within.
This logic of imposition continues in language. There is no conventional storytelling in El-Omari’s work. Instead, there is an amassing of voices, of rituals, of shorelines, of almond trees, of sunsets caught in traffic. As a result, words do not clarify each image; they only complicate it. El-Omari collages fragments of speech, poetry and translation. The films hover in a space between tongues. The subject of language is the core of from where to where من وين لوين d’où vers où (2021), where a conversation moves fluidly between Arabic, French and English; while subtitles of a different conversation, a more poetic one, appear at the same time, also in all three languages, on the haptic surface of the screen. Speech and subtitle refuse linguistic dominance and equivalence; meaning is constantly deferred, displaced across registers. This uprootedness of language mirrors the placelessness of the daily rituals the film attends to: making Arabic coffee, preparing hummus, smoking nargileh, and slicing watermelon. Ritual becomes portable, grounding practices replanted. The images behave similarly: they overlap, never fully settling.
Family is central to El-Omari’s filmmaking process. Family members dominate the credits of each film and provide source material from footage to interviews, as well as inspiration for the production of each work itself. Family comes to the fore in the 2021 work in the jasmine vines, which consists mainly of home video footage from 1999, which is edited into a montage with a soundtrack of traditional oud music. Fawzy El-Omari, El-Omari’s grandfather (gedo), smiles at the camera as he paints eggs. We hear a poetic invocation of his story, of a lost time. The imagined and the documented collapse into one another, as grey pencil illustrations are incorporated and imposed onto old photographic postcards, to reconstruct inherited memories. The only moment of silence is during a sunset, overlaid with footage of men in keffiyehs waving the Palestinian flag and dancing the dabke. The archival footage glitches because memory does not stream smoothly; it never arrives as a seamless frame.
What begins as intimate memory becomes a collective experience passed down. The unity of family scales outward into the unity of struggle. The family archive becomes evidence, and the personal becomes political without relinquishing intimacy. Momentum (2025), El-Omari’s latest film, draws from family archival footage of Ramallah on 31 March 2001, otherwise known as Land Day. The stakes of overlaying images shift. In the earlier films, overlay suggests drift; memories floating across one another without anchoring. In Momentum, layering sharpens into counter-archival urgency. To layer is to contest with more meaning, more context. Returning to the footage more than twenty years later, El-Omari constructs a monument from it. The close-up footage suggests not reportage but her own latent witnessing.
This distinction matters. Where mainstream news asserts objectivity, El-Omari relinquishes it. The close-up is inquisitive rather than declarative, evoking the sensation of being there rather than fixing the event within a single explanatory frame, from a distant moment in history. Watching becomes relational rather than extractive. The surface of the screen, painted, bears the mark of that relation. History is always mediated, always layered, and insistently refusing the fixedness demanded of it. What remains, finally, is not an image of land or family, but a textured, moving surface where they continue to meet in the dreamscape of cinema.
Róisín Tapponi (b. 1999) is a novelist and film programmer. She founded Shasha Movies, the independent streaming platform for artist film and video from South-West Asia and North Africa. In 2024, Tapponi graduated with a PhD from University of St. Andrews.
